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Has the industry given up on ISA improvements?

My impression is that a 10x efficiency improvement in general purpose code isn’t enough to make it change horses any more, because general purpose is becoming less important.

With wafer scale machine learning and quantum computing we are so down the road to special purpose architectures, that GP is really treated like orchestration code.

And RISC-V nicely fills that space were GP code and special purpose extensions make things happen in the embedded world, even if the European Processor Initiative is playing with HPC extensions, too. I can’t see the Mill compete there, because reduced entropy in its instruction space is at the heart of its design.

It’s extremely frustrating to know that with Mills on a current process mobiles, laptops and chromebooks could run just as fast but with much less CPU power, but with displays, RAM and storage already taking the wattage lion share (NPUs, DPUs, IPUs and GPUs the SoC real-estate) and few people having to survive days without charge it wouldn’t really matter that much any more.

At the high-end in cloud servers transistor budgets for cores and Watts to operate them seem much more compelling to pay for architecture switches, but I don’t know if you could scale the Mill meaningfully to dozens of cores in a die.

I fear that the Mill has missed its window of opportunity and I find that extremely sad, because it’s truly great and inspirational design.