[libre-riscv-dev] Vulkanizing

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Wednesday, February 19, 2020, Atif Zafar <atif at pixilica.com> wrote:

> That's awesome Luke. POWER is a great architecture.
>

it has.. "history".  and IBM and the other members, Freescale, etc, have
Serious Clout and prefer to "get things right" if you know what i mean.


> Maybe we should consider designing our own CPU with integrated GPU and VPU
> all from scratch with the best feature set ever designed? There may be
> interest in that from the people I am working with. Just a thought.
>

iinterestingg.

were you thinking of basing it *on* another ISA or a completely new set of
opcodes, or more along the lines of the underlying hardware?

bear in mind, the idea i came up with (ISAMUX / NS) which is exactly like
c++ "using namespace" except at the actual *instruction* level, there's no
technical reason why you couldn't literally splice in an entire new
GPU-suitable instruction set into a POWER (or RISCV or MIPS) instruction
stream

other than the fact that if you do so it means starting from scratch at the
compiler level, which is a hell of a lot of additional work, compared to if
you leverage *someone else's* preexisting ISA and consequently the
preexisting compilers.

so... ISA Level or Hardware level?

l.




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