Reply To: Yearly ping and see how things are going thread?

We’ve been busy completing the sim and compiler toolchains. Making good progress but a lot to do still.

The Coremark results so far show that a Mill Gold will be able to perform on par (CoreMarks/MHz) with recent Intel and AMD CPUs. That is about as much as can be expected for Caremark, considering the nature of the benchmark and the level of focus it has been receiving from compiler writers already.

Essentially, Coremark is a small benchmark that can be run entrirely out of L1 cache, and all branches can be (almost) perfectly predicted given enough cache and predictor tables. For OoO CPUs it then becomes a matter of exploiting all instruction-level parallelism in the code, of which there is not a lot.

The Mill essentially can find the same instruction-level parallelism, and statically schedule it. The compiler toolchain (specializer) still leaves some opportunities for parallelisation unused, so there is some opportunity for improvement available, in the order of 10%.

We’re now moving on to (micro) benchmarks where the Mill will truly shine, which will be in areas like code with more instruction-level parallelism, amenable to auto-vectorisation, and a need for stricter security.