A startup is developing a new CPU hardware that can manipulate its pipelines to be application-optimized. I seem to remember adaptive architecture being an exercise in a Comp Arch class and the punch line is that the overhead of implementing both the ability to mutate and the decision-making algorithms controlling the architecture outweighed the gain of single-threaded compute in an age when “transistors are free.” It will be interesting to see whether this succeeds.

Soft Machines’ VISC Processor Takes an Unorthodox Approach