[GLGirty]

It's a shame they haven't got anything to market. It's such a clever re-think of how instructions operate. If anything, they are probably too far ahead of their time.

Reminds me a bit of Transmeta. "Code morphing" sounds very much like the instruction reordering that's standard now.

[kllrnohj]

Transmeta was an ISA emulator + JIT, and it did ship (it's used by Tegra's "Project Denver" CPU cores).

Doing an emulator/JIT at this level has some severe problems & a very sketchy security story. It's unlikely that anyone else wants to do this, and "AOT" solutions like Rosetta 2 are almost certainly the better approach to ISA flexibility.

[menage]

Mill's approach is pretty similar to Rosetta in this regard - binaries are distributed in a relative high-level abstract format that's a bit like LLVM IR, and code generation for a specific chip's concrete ISA is done at/before installation time.

[GLGirty]

I watched Goddard's lectures a few years ago, and he talked about different price points for the mill--'tiers' of processors that differed mainly, (iirc,) by the size of the belt. He made some claims about porting binaries from one tier to another without compilation from source, and it struck me as a very optimistic claim, for the reasons you hinted at.

My bread and butter work isn't very close to the metal, but you sound more experienced with this sort of thing. Are you familiar with the mill? Do you think they have a chance of avoiding the weeds that Transmeta got stuck in?