Intel Patents 'software Defined Supercore'

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

dmmalam

34 points

27 comments

tomshardware.comTechstory

skepticalmixed

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CPU ArchitectureParallel ProcessingIntel Patents

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CPU Architecture

Parallel Processing

Intel Patents

Intel has filed a patent application for 'Software Defined Supercore', a technology that aims to improve single-thread performance by splitting code into multiple cores, sparking debate among commenters about its feasibility and potential security implications.

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Discussion (27 comments)

Showing 27 comments

arccy

4 months ago

1 reply

how long until we get something like spectre for this...

snickerbockers

4 months ago

3 replies

I doubt it, based on TFA it looks like it has more in common with multi-issue pipelining and ooe than speculative execution.

mhh__

4 months ago

1 reply

Isn't the whole point of OOE that the design is inherently speculative otherwise there's basically nothing to dispatch?

snickerbockers

4 months ago

Not necessarily, there are still situations where the order can be optimized which don't involve branches.

jokoon

4 months ago

3 replies

by TFA you mean the fucking article?

why swear? not I have a problem with it

rep_lodsb

4 months ago

"the fine article"

Cthulhu_

4 months ago

I don't get it either, seems to be a HN culture thing. I get it when people reply to people who haven't read the article (like in RTFM), but it's often used unsolicited and IMO unnecessary.

snickerbockers

4 months ago

Technically you're the only one here who did that.

neuroelectron

4 months ago

There's a lot of processor state in each core which would be a great place to hide exploits when the microcode is assuming synced operation between cores.

IsTom

4 months ago

3 replies

> On the software side, the system uses either a JIT compiler, static compiler, or binary instrumentation to split a single-threaded program into code segments to assign different blocks to different cores. It injects special instructions for flow control, register passing, and sync behavior, enabling the hardware to maintain execution integrity.

Itanium is back again?

euLh7SM5HDFY

4 months ago

2 replies

As bad as it worked out I don't think Itanium tried to break Amdahl's law. And that is how I understand this magic multicore execution of single-thread code.

jerf

4 months ago

I'm surprised they even pursued this line of research, though they may be considering it just as a basic territory claim that they don't have a high expectation of turning into anything. Research into "implicit parallelism" has been done a lot over the years and the consistent result has been that there is a lot less than people intuitively think, and I mean, a lot less. I wouldn't hold out much hope for this... but then again, in a world of nearly frozen clock speeds, it wouldn't take much to stand out.

IsTom

4 months ago

With Itanium they assumed that "smart compilers" would locally parallelize programs.

hakfoo

4 months ago

1 reply

I always thought there was value in a simpler take on this. Especially in the commercial-software world, not everything is compiled for the exact foibles of your current CPU.

Why aren't we running a JIT from x86 to "optimized subset of x86"? how much performance could it buy us?

BuildTheRobots

4 months ago

They kinda do - microcode translates x86(_64) into micro-opts for actual execution. If you go back far enough to the P6 the actual execution core was essentially RISC [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36380149

hulitu

4 months ago

> Itanium is back again?

Itanium was also the trojan horse against competing architectures. From that POV, it succeeded.

btrettel

4 months ago

2 replies

The headline is inaccurate. As far as I can tell, no patents have been granted yet. Intel filed patent applications. Failure to distinguish between applications and granted patents is far too common.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20250217157A1/en

See the sidebar on the right? Look at "Application US18/401,460 events". Note that the status is "Pending" and not "Active" or "Expired". Google isn't always accurate here as their data could be out of date, but they're accurate enough for me to not look further. You can check the other countries as well to see all are pending.

dkiebd

4 months ago

2 replies

Okay? This is not relevant. What matters here is that they have developed this technology. “Patents” in the title of the article is a way of saying that they have developed the technology.

btrettel

4 months ago

1 reply

I don't agree. I think most people would think that "patents" implies that a patent office has granted a patent.

For what it's worth, confusing patents and patent applications is a pet peeve of mine as a former patent examiner. I've seen people criticize the USPTO for apparently granting a patent on some nonsense, but when I look at it, the USPTO rejected the application. The problem is that people can't tell the difference between a patent application and patent. I saw an opportunity to clarify this issue and I took it.

gnirre

4 months ago

” The headline is inaccurate. As far as I can tell, no patents have been granted yet”

Thats not how you need to interpret ”patents” grammatically. You could read that as ”is in the process of patenting”

Is there a good verb for ”files patent applications for”?

You want to consider readability of the headline.

Doxin

4 months ago

> What matters here is that they have developed this technology.

Having a pending patent, or even a granted patent, does not mean the technology described has been invented. There are many many patents on all sorts of infinite energy devices for example. It should go without saying that none of those work.

rs186

4 months ago

Just like articles that say "xx research group publishes new article discovering ..." when it is a preprint on arxiv (especially in "traditional" physical sciences). I mean, they kind of published it, but I would be very careful about reporting work that has not gone through peer review yet.

ch_123

4 months ago

This feels like Intel's researchers explored an idea, and decided to patent it as a matter of routine. The limits of ILP in typical applications are well documented, and I can't imagine that issuing dozens of instructions at once is likely to be useful outside of some very specific benchmarks.

Perhaps one use is to compete with GPUs, but even a multi core CPU is not likely to compete with a GPU in terms of number of arithmetic/vector units.

Havoc

4 months ago

> improving single-thread performance, provided that it has enough parallel work

So cases where the programmer didn’t optimise?

devl547

4 months ago

Softmachines VISC architecture is not dead?

brnt

4 months ago

(Dynamic?) Software Bulldozer? What could possibly go wrong?

m3kw9