The features I would like in my ARM processor (part 1)

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...

128-bit floating point registers.

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.

Where is it needed ?

• Physics engines; often vector units only supports up to 32-bit single-precision floating point calculations, which is not enough for these things.
• Real-life physics calculations and simuations (airodynamics and the like)
• Advanced compression engines; increasing compression ratio and speeding up compression.
• 3D compression of 2D movies (using a 3D computer model represented as 2D) would make movie file sizes much smaller and perhaps quicker to decompress.
• When not doing calculations, the FPU can be used for moving data quickly (as usual).

What would I use it for ?

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.

What would you use it for ?

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 ?