Mill Computing, Inc. › Forums › The Mill › Markets › Has any cloud services or data centers shown interest in funding the mill?

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  • CPUSpeedup
    Participant
    August 25, 2020 at 9:45 am
    Post count: 11
    #3569 |

    I’d imagine companies that do cloud services or have large data centers would be very interested in the watt/performance ratio. Has more than one shown interest? I half suspect no one is interested. Has any shown interest (and money) so we’d be any less of a wait for a chip?

  • Ivan Godard
    Keymaster
    August 25, 2020 at 10:04 pm
    Post count: 689
    #3574

    Sorry, business side details are NDA only. Patience, waiting is.

  • Thomas D
    Participant
    September 7, 2020 at 12:35 pm
    Post count: 24
    #3592

    A real problem with cloud computing providers is that they mainly deal in virtual x86 machines. As such, the Mill wouldn’t be judged by FLOPS/W, but rather “virtual x86 FLOPS”/W. If there were a market here, Transmeta would probably still be around. Then again, maybe Mill can be the new Transmeta.

    • Ivan Godard
      Keymaster
      September 8, 2020 at 1:53 am
      Post count: 689
      #3593

      ISA lock-in, to x86 or any other, can be addressed by runtime emulation or binary-to-binary translation. Emulation tends to be expensive, though if your application give satisfactory performance when written in JavaScript then the cost of binary emulation should be ignorable.

      Binary translation is a more promising solution; the problem is bug-for-bug compatibility. Essentially all x86 codes in particular contain Undefined Behavior. However, the industry is moving toward greater acceptance of translation, and we feel that ISA incompatibility will be of increasingly lesser importance.

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