Mill Cpu Architecture

[Nuke]

http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1320128

ive been looking at this for awhile. its going to be a new from scratch 64-bit architecture thats going to land somewhere between arm and x86 in terms of power consumption/performance/cost. so what do you think?

[Kerbin Dallas Multipass]

Guess the computer world is ready for new CPU architectures, but I ask myself: If it doesnt have to be WIntel compatible, why do I need anything better than a cheap, massproduced ARM?

[Nuke]

any type of chip will be mass produced, thats just the way semiconductor fabs work. arm and x86 are pretty much polar opposites. x86 tries to be the mother of all processors that has insane performance but also huge power demands and cost. and the other end you have the arm, not a performance architecture but very low power and cost. there is a lot of wiggle room in the middle for a new architecture like mill to move in and fill the gap. supposidly it will be very easy to scale up the number of cores. so you might see it used initially in server or supercomputer designs (these are currently dominated by chips that are very power hungry, and so using mill lets you trim your power bill to run these things).

i can also see it breaking into the laptop, tablet, and low end pc markets. i dont see it taking over phones though since arm will still have the very low power design. it wont be replacing our gaming rigs either where we are willing to throw large sums of money at raw performance. the designers are actually aiming for a niche market so as not to step on anyone's toes. even if its not something were ever gonna use its still interesting to see something new.

[3_bit]

Well, ARM is known widely for low-power and x86_64 for high-performance. The only thing's we've seen as far as mobile phones go are x86 processors and ARM processors...

I think a middle ground is what we could really put to good use. However, processors like the Tegra 3 & 4, in my opinion, show an entirely new concept: High-power cores to do the heavy lifting, paired with a more basic low-power core to do things like play music.