You talk about the mill as if it exists. There is no hardware, there are no benchmarks. Bloviating about the excellent performance of the mill is not valuable - showing SPEC CPU results is. VLIW performance was great too, until it wasn't. You can statically schedule everything in theory and the performance will be great, but experience suggests that giving hardware the capability to react dynamically cannot be replaced by static scheduling, except in code with limited branching and a known execution pattern. This is why VLIW works nicely for DSP, and fairly poorly for general purpose computing.
The mill has been in development for 15 years, and almost done for 5. Forgive me for not holding my breath.
I don't understand why people are so willing to say "it won't work" without actually taking the time to understand it. They literally spend like every one of their talks addressing how they overcome traditional vliw problems.
You're the one who chose to click on the link to enter this discussion. You know that the Mill isn't in silicon yet and you're personally only interested in things that are, so why are you here? You're just trolling while other people are trying to have a productive academic discussion.
It isn't a productive academic discussion if you're gatekeeping views that don't match your own, yet are also technically informed.
If there were results from an FPGA synthesised version of the Mill there would be less scepticism. But as it is, the Mill is just a design, and claimed performance/features require more evidence than for an existing architecture.
This "productive academic discussion" of the myriad benefits of the mill architecture has been repeated over and over again for at least 5 years, with very few new developments. There is great value to thinking about new and non traditional architectures, but discussion around this particular venture is pretty tired. I don't know that much more discussion is valuable at this point without some evidence.
> has been repeated over and over again for at least 5 years, with very few new developments.
The same is true of discussions of Intel's architectures; they've only released one new microarchitecture in the past 5 years. Hardware development is slow, even for the people who are already shipping silicon.
The difference is Intel have a proven track record of producing actual products. Mill Computing have not produced anything tangible yet.
The strategy appears from the outside to be one of aggregating IP in the hope that they'll license it (like ARM) or will get acquired for some big amount.
I hope I'm wrong, but I'm not expecting to be able to pick up a Mill CPU in the next 5 years. Maybe even 10.
The mill has been in development for 15 years, and almost done for 5. Forgive me for not holding my breath.