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back to article Now Microsoft ports Windows 10, Linux to homegrown CPU design

Microsoft has ported Windows 10 and Linux to E2, its homegrown processor architecture it has spent years working on mostly in secret. As well as the two operating systems, the US giant's researchers say they have also ported Busybox and FreeRTOS, plus a collection of toolkits for developing and building applications for the …

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  1. Robert Sneddon

    Experiment(al)

    I don't see MS building commercial silicon based on this experimental work -- the Fine Article mentioned that after several years of work the current silicon is Xilink FPGAs running at 50MHz. They're a long way from a taped-out, tested and optimised design coming off a 10nm fab somewhere in quantity 100,000. The rest of the project is cycle-accurate simulations, Matrix-style "silicon" that isn't available off-the-shelf to anyone.

    I can see them using what they've learned from developing this CPU design in future compiler and OS releases running on existing commodity silicon like x86 and ARM, assuming it can be made to work on that sort of classic CPU architecture and makes a noticeable difference in speed, security etc.

    1 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "in conflict with our existing silicon partners."

    That could have come straight from the mouth of the current president of the US of A.

    0 1 Reply
  3. dnicholas

    Curiously removed...

    "Microsoft's website doesn't have a lot of information about E2 – and what was online now isn't. Last week, it curiously removed this page about the work, leaving the URL to redirect to an unrelated project."

    Nothing unusual about this, Microsoft's websites are a garbage fire

    2 1 Reply
  4. PJ_moi
    FAIL

    Microsoft ports... successfully?

    Microsoft haven't built *any* hardware that both works and is long-lasting for more than 20 years. Its last hardware success was - and still is - the Microsoft Mouse. All other hardware projects have fallen by the wayside (Zune, Kinect, Windows Phone...) or, if still (barely) around, riddled with problems. (Xbox? Surface range?) As a result, the idea of MS successfully porting *anything* to a home-grown processor architecture has as much chance of flying long-term as I do.

    0 0 Reply
  5. -tim

    Another level of exploits to defend against?

    These systems have yet another level of security problems. They are much better for Return Oriented Programming but the information flow system also has a state machine like system that can be exploited to make use of the unused or deferred data flow states to move data around.

    0 0 Reply
  6. John Savard

    TRIPS

    Apparently the original TRIPS project went quite far: a 500 MHz prototype chip achieved half the goal - 500 GFLOPS. That was on a 130nm process.

    Since Microsoft now killed the project to allay fears on the part of their "existing silicon partners", though, it looks like this may not see the light of day. Of course, a massively parallel chip that runs some benchmarks impressively, but is slower at running any real software - which is what they could easily have ended up with - is no great loss. Research projects don't always achieve their hoped-for goals, so AMD and Intel may perhaps end up not switching to making the Microsoft chip under license.

    0 0 Reply

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