Soft Rogue: Virtualization of the CPU kernel

Soft Rogue, a mysterious chip start-up, has just unveiled its mystery, and its goal is ambitious: to realize the virtualization of the kernel.

The start-up, named Soft Rogue, is headquartered in Silicon Valley and was founded in 2007 by Intel's former employees Lingareddy and Mohammad Abdallah. At present, soft Rogue employs 250 employees and has branches in India and Russia. The chipmaker, which had been in stealth mode for the first time in Thursday, unveiled its plan at an event organised by Linley Group, a chip-industry research firm.

We know that the operating frequency of the chip (clock frequency) in the 1990 and early 2000 has been a steady increase, but the frequency is too fast will lead to the chip power consumption and overheating problem, so chip manufacturers such as Intel began to take the multi-core route, that is, limit the frequency of single microprocessors, Improve processing performance by integrating multiple processor cores. This is a kind of distributed divide and conquer concurrent processing idea, cloud computing, cloud storage, distributed network and so on are using this kind of idea to solve the scale problem.

The problem is that at the application end, it can take advantage of the few advantages of multi-core processing, so the speed of the user to improve the perception is becoming less obvious. Soft Rogue determined to change the situation. The basic idea is the same-divide and conquer, splitting the computing task into a smaller group that can run concurrently. But soft Rogue's approach is different.

In the past, the chip wanted programmers to design products to send separate instruction streams (so-called threads), which were then processed by the various cores within the processor chip, that is, the decomposition of the task required the application developer to design the implementation. This undoubtedly enhances the threshold for maximizing the performance of multi-core processors.

Now, Soft Rogue has developed a special circuit module that automatically decomposes threads and then passes them on to so-called virtual kernels, which are then assigned to tasks (virtual hardware threads).

Soft Rogue The new CPU architecture as Visc to distinguish it from previous CISC and RISC architectures. Visc can dynamically allocate resources based on different application requirements and balance the performance and power consumption of single/multi-threaded applications. This approach is more flexible and more efficient than traditional kernel scheduling, and eliminates developer intervention. According to soft Rogue's test of its chip working samples, its computational performance is 2 to 4 times times that of ordinary multi-core processors. Soft Rogue is said to have 30 patents on microchips.

This means that the design of the chip can have a variety of options: it can maintain a normal clock frequency to achieve significant performance gains, but also to maintain the chip at an earlier level of performance, but thus significantly reduce power consumption, thereby increasing battery time.

However, the industry may raise questions about this. Because as early as the 1990 's, there has been a chip virtualization efforts. A start-up, named Transmeta, also wanted to abstract software from chip hardware, but failed after a few years of secret tackling.

But soft Rogue has a different business strategy than the technical one. Instead of making its own chips, it sells its inventions to chip companies, which can significantly reduce the cost of liquidity. Soft Rogue The initial customer position on the Android chip manufacturer, although this area arm occupies the absolute dominant position, but Soft rogue in this flourishing ecosystem should still be able to find many opportunities. In addition, Soft Rogue says its technology can also run software for chips written by other companies such as Intel and IBM. This may be the reason why soft Rogue is named, and this openness can also give it a broader market space.

So far soft rogue seems to have won the favor of many people. The financing amount explains everything. At the end of last month, Cbinsights had made a list of stealth-mode start-ups, Soft rogue the top 96 million dollars. According to the demo film, now its total financing amount has reached 125 million U.S. dollars, it can be inferred that the last one months it has received nearly 30 million U.S. dollars of financing. Among the investors are Albert Yu (Shing) and Richard Wirt, two Intel's former executives, Gordon Campbell, and Samsung's venture capital, AMD and the UAE's investment agency Mubadala.

Soft Rogue in Linley Processor Conference a PPT introduced their own this visc new CPU architecture, interested can refer to.