Quote from: Oshyan on June 08, 2019, 09:40:38 PM
Looks like the EU has a venture to "reinvent" CPU architecture as well:
https://www.techspot.com/news/80425-european-union-cpu-development-branch-delivers-first-designs.html
Any thoughts?
- Oshyan
Thank you for the link. I was unaware of such a thing.
According to the article, it is nothing but a re-branding of ARM and RISC-V.
Apparently,
Advanced RISC Machines has been lobbying in government
to garner more (mandatory) support for its products. No surprise there. And
RISC-V is license free. No wonder about that. The article also says that it will
not be used by the consumer markets but only in embedded commercial
applications. That's the part of the article that I like.
To my knowledge, there has been no new development of a 64-bit CISC
architecture since the whole world has jumped onto the RISC band wagon.
RISC proponents would claim that RISC performance is better than CISC
on the basis of comparing 30-year old CISC processors to new RISC ones.
How objective is that? There are many flaws in the arguments by RISC
promoters and one is that RISC processor instruction sets are more
orthogonal that CISC. That is just a lie. Because RISC instructions are
forced to be all the same size, they can't be as orthogonal as a well-
designed CISC processor CAN BE. Nobody has seen what CISC can do
with modern methods and component densities because nobody has
tried in 30 years. The x86 is an old architecture that has had many face-
lifts but current implementations perform admirably when compared
modern RISC machines. Imagine how well a MODERN CISC machine
could perform when implemented using modern methods. Nobody
knows because nobody has tried because of herd mentality.
While almost all processors are targeted at using current software technology
(an understandably short-sighted strategy), ϕEngine is a co-design effort to
correct past mistakes and bring about changes that can't happen unless the
ways we do things are changed
simultaneously. The attitude has been "I'm
not going to change unless you do it first." So we fail to move forward because
nobody wants to take the risk (no pun intended).
But change HAS happened and not for the advancement of computer technology
itself. It has happened to accommodate ancient writing techniques. It is called
Unicode. A while back I wrote this article that you might find interesting.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-most-people-dont-know-ascii-good-bad-unicode-paul-mckneely/My dream has been to develop a system that implements many advanced features
that have been lacking in our computers since the beginning. This system will be
used mostly by enthusiasts who want a better way of doing things. The machine
will be easy to write code for because it will make sense. It will not depend on
hardware and compilers that can only be developed by multi-billion dollar corporations
for obscure, incomprehensible or undocumented processor architectures. Apple has
always been a pretty closed system and they soon plan to dump Intel and will be
using processors of their own design. This seems to be a good strategy for
getting control over all of the aspects of its design so that 3rd-party developers can
be left out in the cold. You will no longer be able to get documentation on how
to program the processor because it will all be inside confidential information.
So all you can do is to choose to buy what they offer or go somewhere else.
My vision is to do something like Linux has done in the way of open-source operating
system development. But Linux has gone in so many directions and it carries a
lot of old baggage. It would be too difficult for it to evolve into what I see as the
future computer. The ϕSystem is more revolutionary. It will incorporate many of
the good standards we are already using but it will discard things that should be
relegated to the past. Of course, we will have to use our current systems to develop
the new platform.
