Reply To: Security

The portal/service concept, along wiht much of hte rest of the Mill security architecture, would appear to be useful as a enhancement/modification to other CPU architectures. It appears to be lighter weight and more powerful than a traditional MMU (well, Memory Protection Unit, since there’s no hardware virtual memory on the Mill).

The Mill is a 64-bit machine with a massive 60-bit physical address space (“an exabyte should be enough for anybody”), so an MPU is more appropriate. But there are lots of other processor uses that would benefit from a flexible MPU managing non-virtual memory: Just about every embedded system (my specialty).

Do you think all or part the Mill security model could be usefully ported to 32-bit embedded processors? If so, is MillComputing considering any of the following?

1. Port Mill innovations to existing architectures (with available IP: ARM, Nios, Mips, etc). (This could allow MillComputing to get fab experience and hardware revenue before the Mill itself is ready for roll-out.)

2. License Mill innovations to those wanting to incorporate them into existing architectures. (License revenue, like ARM.)

3. Some combination, where an experienced fabless partner (say, Qualcomm) would get limited Mill IP (for Snapdragon) in exchange for helping push the Mill toward silicon.

Yes, ARM and Nios already have MPUs available, but they seem primitive compared to the Mill security architecture.