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Thoughts on software-defined silicon

Thoughts on software-defined silicon

Posted Feb 19, 2022 12:58 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Thoughts on software-defined silicon by khim
Parent article: Thoughts on software-defined silicon

Going back many years, to microcode running on processors with speeds in KHz arena ...

50-series Pr1mes actually came with a microcode update if you were running INFORMATION (aka Pick) on them, it added a whole bunch of instructions specially optimised for handling strings, to make the database more efficient.

THAT would be an interesting feature on modern silicon :-)

Cheers,
Wol

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Thoughts on software-defined silicon

Posted Feb 26, 2022 5:17 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

We *almost* had a chance to see that: Zen2 chips emulate a few instructions (BMI2 set) in microcode, and they're pitifully slow to the point of being better to hand-roll in C. If they could've fixed it in an update it would've been interesting news… but maybe they just didn't care for such a niche thing.


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