Reply To: news?

What you say rings true to my naive ears, but what does it mean for the Mill?

To my understanding RISC-V is a totally unremarkable architecture which on its own would come decades too late and offer none of Mill’s merits, but the easily extended instruction set punches exactly where it counts: special purpose acceleration seamlessly baked into general purpose outer loops. And here we are talking 3 or more orders of magnitude better than general purpose instructions, where the Mill might deliver one order of magnitude for a similar transistor budget.

But exactly because one way it achieves this advantage is by using a reduced encoding space for code, it loses ISA extensability AFAIK.

Of course, accelerators might just be memory mapped and orchestrators just need to ready the bits in the RAM that neural code might then decode as sparse. The Mill might still deliver 10:1 benefits on orchestration, but is that enough to motivate a switch of ISA?

That’s where I am looking for reassurance, because I just love the Mill. But loving it, doesn’t mean being convinced about the value it can deliver.