Reply To: Is the Tachyum Prodigy perceived as a potential market threat?

I may be in the minority, but I am excited about Mill’s security implications more than the improvement in performance.

On the Mill stack smashing for ROP is impossible. Integer overflows can fault for free (if the programming model allows). Something like Rust can enforce integer overflow checking outside of debug mode with no performance hit. Micro-kernels can also work about as quickly as mono-kernels. This means something like zircon could be used for performance critical server work. I call out zircon specifically because it is the most likely commercially viable micro-kernel since it is being developed for practical applications by a large company with a large OS install base.

I also imagine that after some optimization the MIMD nature of the Mill will allow bounds checking to be free (in time, not power) in most cases.

Tachyum seems to only be concerned with performance. To be fair, that is probably the most important thing and will likely be the main and only factor customers use. I look forward to them actually releasing a thing and comparing it to Altra for general purpose (non-HPC/AI) workloads.

I am concerned that if they succeed the Mill won’t be able to bring enough to the table to be worth a switch. If Tachyum are on time, I imagine that Mill would be 5 to 10 years behind.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by  stephenmw.