Thursday, March 27, 2008 9:18 AM SergeyS

Microsoft should take over CPU architecture.

CPU, such as Intel's or AMD's CPUs are complex "hard-wired" systems. CPU structure is very loosely coupled with the .NET structure. This kind of abstraction is becoming a fundamental bottleneck in evolution of computer systems since silicon is getting cheaper and more capacious.

Currently software code could be served by 1 to 8 hardware servers named CPU cores. This is like if, say, all the FedEx customers would be served not by thousands trucks, but rather 4 super-fast trains.

What needed is NOT a few fast pipes (CPU cores) a code could reach the hardware through, but rather a marketplace where software objects could bid for job being done, described in their contracts; and hardware items be dynamically organized into units to perform the job. That is, when an object instance (in C# or VB.NET) is initialized; it would be assigned some hardware to run on asynchronously. The assignment would be conducted under some “market” policy.

Such hardware organization is not Intel's, or AMD's, or Xilinx's area of activity. They should mass product cheap chips with the huge number of universal items. That’s the job of Microsoft to find a way to get all the units fit the .NET model without bottlenecks. Good luck Microsoft!
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Vy hochete pesen - ih est' u menya.

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Comments

# re: Microsoft should take over CPU architecture.

Thursday, March 27, 2008 8:10 AM by Max

Hey Sergey,

How do you see your concept fit into a casual PC? Maybe it could make its way into PCs as a chip onboard of a PCI-E extension board? Say, a 'CLR Diamond Monster C#-FX X-elerator' or whatever you call it ;) Or an array of manageable virtual cores in the CPU?

BTW: Ty tozhe pyan kak poslednyaya svinya? :)

# re: Microsoft should take over CPU architecture.

Thursday, March 27, 2008 8:54 AM by parvenu74

Sun Microsystems did just this with the MAJC (Microprocessor Architecture for Java Computing). It was such a flop of an idea it never became a commercially viable product. Microsoft would be wise to stay out of the CPU design business and focus more on the "how do we improve Windows" business.

# re: Microsoft should take over CPU architecture.

Thursday, March 27, 2008 9:36 AM by SergeyS

Max wrote:

> Maybe it could make its way into PCs

> as a chip onboard of a PCI-E extension

> board?

I don't know. Perhaps at the beginning it could be some external hardware, but normally it should be the CPU to be built on the architecture. The CPU should be sort of advanced CPLD or FPGA; in mass production on <45nm technologies they will be dirt cheap.

# re: Microsoft should take over CPU architecture.

Thursday, March 27, 2008 9:55 AM by SergeyS

parvenu74 wrote:

"Microsoft would be wise to stay out of the CPU design business and focus more on the "how do we improve Windows" business"

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I don't think so. The success of "Windows' business does depend on the underlying CPU. The threshold between hardware and software should be shifted down to when all the hardware "smartness" is implemented in software.

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