Mill Computing, Inc. Forums The Mill Architecture Introduction to the Mill CPU Programming Model Reply To: Introduction to the Mill CPU Programming Model

cheery
Participant
Post count: 7

I just read this post and watched few videos again.

The execution and load format are different in this architecture. Whenever a program wants to run something, it will push it to the specializer, which translates a load format into execution format that fits this machine.

So the load formatted code doesn’t contain details about the belt size or operation latencies. Which properties does the loadcode preserve compared to the execode?

How fast is the specializer in theory? It needs to schedule a graph of operations into shortest possible instruction sequence that can be executed by the machine, because every instruction counts unlike in OOE -machines. Each operation in the graph has a duration it takes and dependencies to other operations. There are logical end-points – the data stores and control flow branches. It sounds like the specializer needs to compute the critical path from the code, which is longest path problem and that can be computed in linear time. I’m just not sure what else it’d need to do, I’ve only thought about it for three days, not sure about what I’m looking at.

It also looks like the loops need to be vectorized by the compiler. Is it a hard thing to do? Sounds like something easy for tracing JIT compiler, hard for a traditional compiler.

If these are topics of the upcoming video lectures, I can wait for the videos. It’ll be interesting to follow it all. It may very well become an exciting new platform.

  • This reply was modified 10 years, 8 months ago by  cheery.