Blogging from ISCA: AMAS-BT: Pardo, Crusoe

Transmeta Crusoe

VLIW 5 wide

Generic simulation support

Shadowed registers, commit/abort

Gated store buffer - 32 entries x 32 bytes.

load-and-protect - like ALAT (hw trap)

x86 condition code support.

PC support - low memory steering I/O vs. DRAM. A20M. Crusoe had hardware for memory map.

Crusoe: x86 ISA support, entirely software decode.
Pardo argues that x86 decode big & power hungry.

LongRun, voltage scaling. E.g. leave CPU at 90%, mem at 100%

Shade: 100 inst/sim inst. Perf 3:1 int, 1:1 FP.

Crusoe translation: 10,000 inst/inst.

Schedulig to VLIW target harder than Shade's RISC SPARC target.

x86 reuse rates low.

Crusoe summary:

Reliability, x86ness - good

Cost: good 1/2 Intel/AMD

Power: good 1/3 Intel/AMD

Perf: umm...

Crusoe faster than low power parts, but slower than 15W laptop parts.

Compute bound, often faster at lower watts. But there aren't that many compute bound workloads.

Memory/cache traffic: slower.

Low reuse: translation overhead -> slower

Crusoe has system gotchas:

PCI graphics, not AGP.

Software DMA, not overlapped.


How to do a small project:

Automate, automamte, automate.

Reference simulator. Must be fast enough go boot OS.

Fast VLIW simulator (for host): 30 inst/sim inst. (30 I/I)

Never published?

Narrowing: Reverse execution. Cosimulation, compae. "Nexus" binary search for first divergence. => Bit 17 in register 5 is wrong in this context ... I.e. nexus = automatic bug narrowing.

Testing:

conventional, hand written

Random. Biased to interesting cases.

"Test" means "checkable". Crash => failure. Consistency check => suspicious.

AFG Q: MP non-determinism.

AFG: one nice aspect of SW DMA would be reproducibility.

Reverse HW execution in HW VLIW debugger started, no finished.

Single step trough nested fault handling. A complete debuggeris totally transparent.

Fast builds. Check in early and often.

On failure: binary search of checkins.

War stories...

CMS SW allowed working around many hardware bugs.

Not all reg resources were shadowed. Some bugs due to rolling back after non-shadowed state changed. Added rules checker to catc future bugs.

What Pardo would do differently:

Hardware was bottleneck. Changing ISA was *different* for software teams.

Big projects rules of thumb do not apply to small teams.

Better perf studies from get go. (Threw out 1st 2 CMS.)

More software inspection.

--

CMS written in C, gcc extension to provide HW access. More control.

Modest amount of assembly. Modest amount. Including modest amount of self modifying VLIW assembly code.

Not MP.