Reply To: Grab bag of questions

– 11) Feature detection

Are there any plans for the general Mill ISA to have instructions of the form “If this feature is available on the target architecture, compile this EBB, otherwise compile this other EBB”? I know something similar is planned for WebAssembly.

– 12) Any plans for over-128-bits SIMD?

In past discussions on the subject you seemed to think it was a future possibility? Now that AVX-512 has been out for a while, have you settled?

Do you think there’s benefit in having 256-bits or 512-bits vector instructions, or do you think having a very wide pipeline always provides the same benefits?

– 13) Economy cores

Recently, mobile CPUs and the Apple M1 have started to use designs based on “economy cores”. The idea being that the CPU includes a large number of small, low-frequency, less-performant cores that the device could use both as additional threads on heavy workloads, and as the only threads for when the device needs to conserve power.

Could the Mill provide a similar architecture? In the past you’ve floated the idea of a chip with both Silver and Tin cores (I think), but those would have incompatible binary formats. Have you considered ways a single device (eg smartphone) could run multiple cores with different specs while still executing the same binaries?