Beyond RISC-V: A Revolution in Distance-Based Instruction Set Architectures

2025-06-04
Beyond RISC-V: A Revolution in Distance-Based Instruction Set Architectures

CPU core instruction decoding and execution widths have significantly increased in recent years, but the cost of register renaming limits further scaling. This article introduces a distance-based instruction set architecture that eliminates register renaming by specifying operands based on the distance from the instruction's result, thus reducing hardware complexity and power consumption. Researchers have developed three distance-based instruction sets (STRAIGHT, Clockhands, and TURBULENCE) and successfully fabricated a chip based on the STRAIGHT instruction set. This innovation promises significant performance improvements for both CPUs and GPUs, especially for GPUs due to their flexible intermediate representation, making adoption easier.

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Hardware

US Research Funding Freeze: Innovation Engine Stalls

2025-05-12
US Research Funding Freeze: Innovation Engine Stalls

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) froze all outgoing funding, abruptly canceling over 1,000 research projects and halting roughly $739 million in research funds. This has caused widespread chaos in academia, forcing labs to shut down, jeopardizing graduate students' degrees, and leaving early-career faculty without grants. The article argues that this threatens the future of the US tech industry, as many tech giants' technologies originated from publicly funded university research. It calls for tech companies to reciprocate and collectively protect the research ecosystem to prevent a talent shortage.

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