Variable Instruction Computing: What Is Old Is New Again (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: Higher performance, lower power. One of the challenges with hitting both of those benchmarks is the need to adhere to established instruction sets like x86. One interesting development is the use of Variable Instruction Sets at the silicon level. The basic concept of translating established instructions to something more efficient for the specific architecture isn't new; this is what yielded the first low-power x86 processors at the beginning of the century. But those relied on the translation at the software level. A company called Soft Machine is paving the way for variable instructions in hardware. Think of it as an emulator for ARM, x86, and other architectures that is running on silicon for fast execution while sipping very little power.

Comments

So, its like x86 already is?

[BitZtream]

So instead of the current situation where we have intel/amd processors doing something under the hood, using microcode as the language that translate the x86 environment into whatever is actually on the silicon ... and you're going to add ARM to it, and maybe some other ones?

Thats cool and all, but its not really all that useful, and intel can pretty much already do that on any CPU it wants with a microcode update. ARM may not run as efficiently on the core that intel uses, but it can be done from a technical point of view.

Its not worth it. Thats why no one does it.

You'll effectively do nothing well.

Intel was an ARM licensee (probably still is), they know ARM as good as anyone outside of ARM itself ... and they made entirely new silicon to run it (well technically they bought it if I recall correctly) ... and it even had its own microcode ... But what they never did was share a single core between both ARM and x86 CPUs that could change modes with a microcode update. No reason they couldn't other than its not efficient.