UPDATED 08:20 EDT / OCTOBER 27 2014

Soft Machines Showcasing Their VISC Chip NEWS

Startup Soft Machines claims its chip design more than doubles CPU performance

Soft Machines Showcasing Their VISC Chip

Soft Machines Showcasing Their VISC Chip

Stealthy semiconductor design startup Soft Machines Inc., has come out with a Variable Instruction Set Computing (VISC) conceptual architecture that it says could usher in a new era of scaling and performance.

Soft Machines believes it has overcome efficiency challenges that have frustrated improvements in microprocessor designs recent years. Its press release boasts that its VISC architecture achieves “3-4 times more instructions per cycle (IPC), leading to 2-4 times higher performance-per-watt on single- and multi-threaded applications” compared with today’s CISC and RISC CPU designs. That’s compared to Intel’s performance gains of between 5 and 15 percent with its high-end chips for the past several generations.

VISC was debuted at the Linley Processor Conference last Thursday, where it offered the following explanation of what’s involved:

“The VISC architecture is based on the concept of “virtual cores” and “virtual hardware threads.” This new approach enables dynamic allocation and sharing of resources across cores. Microprocessors based on CISC and RISC architectures make use of “physical cores” and “software threads,” an approach that has been technologically and economically hamstrung by transistor utilization, frequency and power-scaling limitations.”

For now it’s still a conceptual architecture, but the potential is huge if Soft Machines can accelerate the execution of a single software thread by bunching together disparate groups of execution units and registers, as it claims.

“We founded Soft Machines with the mission of reviving microprocessor performance-per-watt scaling,” said Soft Machines co-founder, president and CTO Mohammad Abdallah, in a statement. “We have done just that with the VISC architecture, marking the start of a new era of CPU designs. CPU scaling was declared dead when the power wall forced CISC- and RISC-based designs into multi-core implementations that require unrealistically complex multi-threading of sequential applications.”

VISC overcomes this by running virtual hardware threads on virtual cores that are far more efficient that software multi-threading. VISC can scale by altering the number of virtual cores and threads, providing a single architecture that’s able to meet the needs of just about any app. More to the point, VISC CPUs should be compatible with most existing software too, as it relies on a “light-weight ‘virtual software layer’ to do the work.

Soft Machines hasn’t yet said what it intends to do with its technology, but PC World speculates that the most likely outcome is acquisition by a major chip vendor if the company’s claims are real. Alternatively, competitors could fast-track the development of a similar technology.


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