Originally this blog post was intended to be all-in-one, but I was suggested to split it into smaller parts.
So what I'll do, is that I'll mention the features I'd like in my ARM processor, one at a time, piece by piece.
The purpose of this, is to throw in new ideas (good and bad) to the ARM engineers.
-Features, that may be able to make a difference, especially features, which would help the soft- and hardware developers in getting to new places.
Now let's start...
Currently, the only processor I know of, that supports 128-bit floating point calculation, is the PowerPC (combining two 64-bit registers).
If we had 128-bit floating point registers, we could calculate precision math very quickly.
I'd use such feature to make billions of planet gravity calculations per second.
These mainly include multiply and add, subtract and square-root calculations.
Having a high precision vector unit would definitely make insane performance boosts here.
I know we will get there some day (after Cortex-A57), but the sooner we'll get it, the sooner we'll get the cool end-results.
Perhaps it'll be the next Cortex-A, which can deliver an impressive performance when it comes to precision math, opening up further possibilities.
If you had a 128-bit precision floating point unit, what would you use it for - or what kind of things do you think it could be used for ?
My brother and I have discussed the use of 128-bit floats a few years back.
He needs them desperately and wanted to try out some things on my Mac, even though he's not at all interested in Mac/PPC.
He mentioned that he's disappointed with that intel long doubles are only 96 bit (which also sounds strange to me).
For now, 64-bit integer registers will be OK for a while. Having 128-bit integer registers in addition to the 128-bit float registers would make it easier to transfer values between the units, but perhaps not required.
As long as a 64-bit integer value could be transferred to a 64-bit float, I think we'd probably do fine there.
In addition to what I mentioned in the above post, there will be large benefits in audio compression as well. New video and audio formats will be invented, since compression will have higher ratio and the lossy compression quality wlll be improved too.
I must say that the idea jonnydoin mentions is very interesting. -If not reducing the number of simultaneous registers and register values, the idea is indeed worth looking further into.
Perhaps the register file could be 'semi shared', which means the integer registers could have two register-banks; one shared with the floating point unit and one private. I know that partly disagrees with Jonny's idea about saving silicon, but I would prefer being able to keep twice as many values in registers.