[sroussey]

Will be interesting when (if?) Intel ships software defined cores which are the logical inverse of hyper threading.

Instead of having a big core with two instruction pipelines sharing big ALUs etc, they have two (or more) cores that combine resources and become one core.

Almost the same, yet quite different.

https://patents.google.com/patent/EP4579444A1/en

[tgma]

There was the dreaded AMD FX chip which was advertised as 8 core, but shared functional units. Got sued, etc.

[hedora]

That patent seems to be describing a dumb way to implement pipelining / speculative execution. Am I missing something?

Anyway, by my reading, it’s also similar to the Itanic, er, Itanium, where the “cores” that got combined were pipeline stages.

[tgma]

I did not read the patent (do not read patents as a matter of policy.) Was simply responding to the second paragraph that kind of reminded me of FX Bulldozer chips.