Soft Machines reveals performance targets for its VISC processors
Soft Machines continues to develop CPUs built using its VISC architecture. If you're not already familiar with VISC, be sure to read our in-depth look at VISC from October of last year. As a quick refresher, VISC works by inserting a middleware layer between the native instruction set architecture of the operating system above and the hardware beneath. This middleware then translates the native ISA into VISC's native instruction set before distributing the workload across the processor's virtual cores.
VISC's trick is that even in single-threaded workloads, it can break that work into chunks that Soft Machines calls "threadlets." In turn, a VISC CPU can distribute the work of a demanding single thread on a virtual core across multiple hardware cores. It can also ...