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Intel Patents 'Software Defined Supercore'

tomshardware.com

11–20 of 28 posts

Re: Intel Patents 'Software Defined Supercore'

#11
post #5

> On the software side, the system uses either a JIT compiler, static compiler, or binary instrumentation to split a single-threaded program into code segments to assign different blocks to different cores. It injects special instructions for flow control, register passing, and sync behavior, enabling the hardware to maintain execution integrity. Itanium is back again?

As bad as it worked out I don't think Itanium tried to break Amdahl's law. And that is how I understand this magic multicore execution of single-thread code.

I'm surprised they even pursued this line of research, though they may be considering it just as a basic territory claim that they don't have a high expectation of turning into anything. Research into "implicit parallelism" has been done a lot over the years and the consistent result has been that there is a lot less than people intuitively think, and I mean, a lot less. I wouldn't hold out much hope for this... but then again, in a world of nearly frozen clock speeds, it wouldn't take much to stand out.

Re: Intel Patents 'Software Defined Supercore'

#12
post #2

how long until we get something like spectre for this...

I doubt it, based on TFA it looks like it has more in common with multi-issue pipelining and ooe than speculative execution.

Isn't the whole point of OOE that the design is inherently speculative otherwise there's basically nothing to dispatch?

Re: Intel Patents 'Software Defined Supercore'

#13
This feels like Intel's researchers explored an idea, and decided to patent it as a matter of routine. The limits of ILP in typical applications are well documented, and I can't imagine that issuing dozens of instructions at once is likely to be useful outside of some very specific benchmarks.

Perhaps one use is to compete with GPUs, but even a multi core CPU is not likely to compete with a GPU in terms of number of arithmetic/vector units.

Re: Intel Patents 'Software Defined Supercore'

#14
post #2

how long until we get something like spectre for this...

I doubt it, based on TFA it looks like it has more in common with multi-issue pipelining and ooe than speculative execution.

by TFA you mean the fucking article?

why swear? not I have a problem with it

Re: Intel Patents 'Software Defined Supercore'

#15
post #6

The headline is inaccurate. As far as I can tell, no patents have been granted yet. Intel filed patent applications . Failure to distinguish between applications and granted patents is far too common. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20250217157A1/en See the sidebar on the right? Look at "Application US18/401,460 events". Note that the status is "Pending" and not "Active" or "Expired". Google isn't always accurate…

Just like articles that say "xx research group publishes new article discovering ..." when it is a preprint on arxiv (especially in "traditional" physical sciences). I mean, they kind of published it, but I would be very careful about reporting work that has not gone through peer review yet.

Re: Intel Patents 'Software Defined Supercore'

#16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it, based on TFA it looks like it has more in common with multi-issue pipelining and ooe than speculative execution.

by TFA you mean the fucking article? why swear? not I have a problem with it

I don't get it either, seems to be a HN culture thing. I get it when people reply to people who haven't read the article (like in RTFM), but it's often used unsolicited and IMO unnecessary.

Re: Intel Patents 'Software Defined Supercore'

#17
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it, based on TFA it looks like it has more in common with multi-issue pipelining and ooe than speculative execution.

by TFA you mean the fucking article? why swear? not I have a problem with it

"the fine article"

Re: Intel Patents 'Software Defined Supercore'

#18
post #5

> On the software side, the system uses either a JIT compiler, static compiler, or binary instrumentation to split a single-threaded program into code segments to assign different blocks to different cores. It injects special instructions for flow control, register passing, and sync behavior, enabling the hardware to maintain execution integrity. Itanium is back again?

> Itanium is back again?

Itanium was also the trojan horse against competing architectures. From that POV, it succeeded.

Re: Intel Patents 'Software Defined Supercore'

#20
post #5

> On the software side, the system uses either a JIT compiler, static compiler, or binary instrumentation to split a single-threaded program into code segments to assign different blocks to different cores. It injects special instructions for flow control, register passing, and sync behavior, enabling the hardware to maintain execution integrity. Itanium is back again?

I always thought there was value in a simpler take on this. Especially in the commercial-software world, not everything is compiled for the exact foibles of your current CPU.

Why aren't we running a JIT from x86 to "optimized subset of x86"? how much performance could it buy us?

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