Agner`s CPU blog

And each program will be built by people with varying levels of skill. People who will not respect the beauty behind the memory organization scheme. And, you have to cater to them, because if their program brings the system to its knees, your chip and the OS will be blamed.

In other words, some crappy app should be able to disrespect the entire memory space...and your chip and OS should handle it with some grace, I believe.

Back to the subject of dreaming about my ideal CPU: These are not well thought out, or even practical, most likely. But they'd be nice Here goes:

1. 16Gb memory on the same chip as the CPU. I don't know what the limitations are, but, if all your PC's memory could be super-fast, on-chip, wow! Memory wait states slow down the CPU a lot, and, ,if it was all on the same chip, you could eliminate all the complex nightmare caching hardware.

2. If not #1, then some really good cache hint/directive instructions.

3. Instead of relying on branch prediction, why not take both branches, and provide the ability to swap pipelines to use the confirmed branch? This dual pipeline could be used for extra execution when branching was not occurring.

4. A hardware block move/fill/swap, page-based. Runs like a background job. An instruction could be used to test for completion by comparing a given address against each pending job's address range.

5. Instead of saving registers on task switch, use an array of registers, indexed by taskid.

I'm sure I could think up some more. As I stated before, I realize that most of these are far-fetched, and do not really fit into Mr. Fog's design.