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Proposal for instruction set - now on Github
Author: Agner Date: 2016-08-06 02:44
Hubert Lamontagne wrote:
What about a specialized AES encryption device, accessed using memory mapped I/O like other peripherals like DMA controllers, timers etc? Wouldn't that do the job, and keep the overall complexity lower? The OS would probably have to make sure no 2 programs are using the AES device at the same time but otherwise it would be pretty straightforwards: set the key, push the data through. Afaik that's close to how ARM does it.
That's a pretty expensive solution. I wouldn't recommend a clone of the x86 AES instructions either, because they have long latencies which is bad for the smooth pipeline structure of ForwardCom. I would prefer to split up the AES operations into small unit operations with single-clock latency. If the length of vector registers is at least 2048 bits and we have full byte permute instructions then you can have a complete 256 byte lookup table contained in one vector register and do the table lookup with a byte permute instruction. The whole AES algorithm could then be implemented with general permute and XOR instructions without any special-purpose instructions. This would be a flexible solution that could be adapted to other encryption algorithms as well. The price is a large permutation circuit.
Text parsing is hard to speed up. It tends to be made up of loops full of loads, stores, and conditional branches, and not very many of the kind of mathematical operations that can be sped up. It's inherently serial in nature.
The branch misprediction penalty is equal to the length of the pipeline. The best way to speed up unpredictable branches is to have a short pipeline or to speculatively execute both sides of a 2-way branch simultaneously. Some text processing jobs can be vectorized, using masked operations etc. UTF-8 conversion can be done with the compress_sparse and expand_sparse instructions in ForwardCom (sorry, they are poorly described in the manual).
Bytecode interpreters fall into a similar category of load-store-jump code and are hard to speed up for similar reasons. A way to put it is that while you can use parallelism to increase the number of calculations per second, you can't use it to increase the number of decisions per second, which tends to be limited by electrical constraints
ForwardCom has a multiway branch instruction which is useful for byte code interpreters, but I think the way to speed up byte code is JIT complation.

Joe Duarte wrote:

Have you been able to guess at performance improvements from the new ISA? Holding everything else equal, the foundry technology, etc. would ForwardCom be faster or more efficient than a comparable Broadwell-E? I'm thinking of your new loops, for example, and other features. What sense do you have of the performance difference?
Hubert Lamontagne wrote:
That's a pretty high target! To get anything close to this performance, you'd need to run ForwardCom at about 4 instructions per cycle, and considering the complexity of ForwardCom instructions, this would require a pretty large and complex CPU core.
The target of ForwardCom is indeed to beat the performance/price ratio of existing systems. It is designed with a simple and consistent pipeline structure. It is doing one thing taking one clock cycle at each pipeline stage, except for multiplication, division, and a few other necessary things.

We should not forget, however, that in many applications the bottleneck is not the CPU but cache, memory access, disk access, or network speed.

 
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