[libre-riscv-dev] Vulkanizing

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

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

> I'm thinking completely re-architecting the CPU from scratch with features
> not seen before such as dataflow/systolic array processing, customizable
> instructions by the user, customizable data widths etc. It would be a
> massive effort that would need to be undertaken as a new startup with
> significant funding and the right team.


okaay.  yes that's a big undertaking.  we have a kind of cumustomiseable
width ALU, already it is "dynamic SIMD".

basically gates open up between partitions and the smaller part-results can
be used in a cascade to create larger ones: 16 bit, 24 bit, 32 bit etc.

the tradeoff obviously is that double the bitwidth you halve the MIPS rate.

it is however pretty hair raising and we drew the line at extending the
concept into the FP realm due to the amount of data routing required.

customiseable instructions has kinda been done before (linus torvalds
worked for Transmeta) so we know it is doable..  ish.

sounds fascinating, do keep in touch about it.

l.



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