Agner`s CPU blog

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Proposal for instruction set - now on Github
Author:  Date: 2016-08-08 18:41
Hubert Lamontagne wrote:
Text parsing is hard to speed up. It tends to be made up of loops full of loads, stores, and conditional branches, and not very many of the kind of mathematical operations that can be sped up. It's inherently serial in nature. Afaik, there are only 2 approaches for this at the moment:

- If your load is to run a whole bunch of programs at the same time (= it's a server), you can use the UltraSparc design: a really simple in-order CPU that uses tons of hyper-threading, and every time something stalls just switch to the next thread. The simple in-order core takes a lot less space so you can cram a whole bunch of them on the same chip, which lets you compensate for speed deficiencies.

- Otherwise, just use a general purpose out-of-order CPU that's as fast as possible. x86 fits this profile perfectly (which is why it's so popular still) and ARM is evolving towards that too. This is part of why RISC is popular: starting with a classic 4-issue out-of-order CPU like the Dec Alpha 21264, it's very hard to find new instructions to add that will actually speed it up at text processing and not be overly specific, and afaik the stuff that speed it up the most are just making branch prediction and data cache as fast as possible (look at x86 evolution for a perfect example of this).

I'm thinking of approaches Parabix: http://parabix.costar.sfu.ca/
One of their papers: https://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ashriram/publications/2012_HPCA_Parabix.pdf

I guess it just comes down to vector instructions and their parallel bitstreams approach. (Another way to boost it would be multiplexed streams, but that's a different plane of the architecture than the ISA.)

Hubert wrote:
That's a pretty high target! To get anything close to this performance, you'd need to run ForwardCom at about 4 instructions per cycle, and considering the complexity of ForwardCom instructions, this would require a pretty large and complex CPU core. My hunch is that it would run at about the same speed as x86, but simply require less design time to implement all the crazy instruction unpacking and 286-era segmenting intricacies. I don't think ForwardCom would scale very well past 4 instructions per cycle, but to be fair I don't think any instruction set does (they tried to do it with Itanium and failed).
Well, Broadwell-E is a high target right now, but the target is moving. It's going to be a low target in 2020. Of course Agner's not necessarily thinking in terms of marketable silicon, but more toward a useful reference and engineering exercise. I'm just wondering what kind of performance wins are possible. Another way of framing it: If a well-funded team rolled up their sleeves and built a new general purpose CPU architecture from scratch, including a new ISA and tape out and all that, using TSMC or Samsung's 16/14 nm process, could they beat Intel/Skylake? Maybe Intel is wringing all the performance out of current processes that the physics allows, and the legacy technical debt is only a design cost overhead. They seem to be treading water since Haswell, so I sometimes wonder if a better architecture would make a difference or if the wall is more fundamental than Intel.

By the way, do you think Itanium was just too early, with too little tooling? Does an out of order CISC have any inherent advantage over VLIW or EPIC? It seems goofy to send one instruction at a time. I haven't found any deep-dive post-mortems on Itanium, just vague claims that no one could build a good compiler for it, or that the physical product just wasn't that fast. I think we're going to see some big advances in compiler technology in the near future, with powerful platforms like IBM Watson doing things a laptop-bound compiler can't do.

By the way, regarding the idea of specialized AES encryption device, Intel offered QuickAssist on the v2 and v3 Xeons: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/embedded/technology/quickassist/overview.html

They don't seem to offer it on the Broadwells. It's a dedicated accelerator for encryption and compression, but I've never found a detailed review anywhere. Do either of you know more about it? I'm surprised it didn't get more attention.
 
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