A year ago The Tech Report talked with a representative from a company called Soft Machines who were designing processors using their new VISC architecture.  We are all familiar with CISC and RISC based designs, this new Virtual Instruction Set Computing is a new architecture designed after multicore processors became the norm.  The architecture is designed from the ground up to take advantage of multiple cores and is able to virtualize both cores and threads across multiple physical cores.  That means a demanding process that is still only a single thread could be run on a virtual core across multiple hardware cores, increasing the speed at which that task can be completed. 

Their current design, named Shasta is fabbed on a 16nm FinFET process, uses a generic 256-bit interconnect bus for compatibility with a wide variety of infrastructures and currently runs at 2GHz.  The Tech Report doesn't have any benchmarks per se, but you can read more about how this new architecture works here.

"Soft Machines presented details about its intriguing VISC CPU architecture, along with a roadmap for VISC CPUs and SoCs, at the 2015 Linley Processor Conference today. We spoke with Soft Machines founder and CTO Mohammad Abdallah and the company's VP of marketing and business development, Mark Casey, to learn more about these chips."

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