> I'd love to see the result of a concerted ground-up creation of a hardware and software system that starts from scratch and leaves unresolvable legacy considerations to virtual machines or whatever.
This has been tried often. (Thinking Machines, Multiflow, e.g., not to mention Itanium) I would love to see this too; I worked for a startup that tried to do this (vliw, no specex), and taped out with a working chip, after 6 months. Maybe the startup didn't have the right sales team, but they didn't manage to make any meaningful sales, the culture in the buyer's market is too conservative.
In the case of the company I worked for I suspect that part of the problem is that conservative buyers will look for excuses to say no, instead of excuses to say yes. One such example is that nobody would accept that you could move specex to the compiler, with the old "sufficiently advanced compiler" joke, despite the fact that they could prove that llvm was "advanced enough".
This has been tried often. (Thinking Machines, Multiflow, e.g., not to mention Itanium) I would love to see this too; I worked for a startup that tried to do this (vliw, no specex), and taped out with a working chip, after 6 months. Maybe the startup didn't have the right sales team, but they didn't manage to make any meaningful sales, the culture in the buyer's market is too conservative.
In the case of the company I worked for I suspect that part of the problem is that conservative buyers will look for excuses to say no, instead of excuses to say yes. One such example is that nobody would accept that you could move specex to the compiler, with the old "sufficiently advanced compiler" joke, despite the fact that they could prove that llvm was "advanced enough".