Well, the real problem is, they want to be able to boot existing x86 code on it. Not merely run, but boot.
Well, I was thinking of coprocessor as something directly accessible through the QuickPath that doesn't require an OS at all. For example what AMD does to support FPGA in Opteron sockets over HyperChannel. Such co-processor wouldn't need to boot in the classic OS sense, more like it would need to support "reset" without resetting the neighboring CPU.
I'm thinking they're this: Atom-like cores, dual issue, in order execution, no x87 FPU, and a 512 bit SIMD unit that does both integer and fp, 32?kb of L1, and a small amount of L2.
Now, given that sounds shitty, but if I can run normal threads on those instead of lockstep thread clusters and the SIMD units support booleans (512 of them at a time) or chars (64 at a time), this could actually end up with surprisingly fast mining.
I think Knight had granted your wishes, mostly. There's still support for legacy FP, but XMM & YMM registers are replaced by ZMM. There's no support for chars, but there is for Int32 and Int64. If you were thinking of bit-slice parallel implementation for miner then those Int* types will allow that. Multiprocessing and miltithreading is all compliant with OpenMP.
The docs for architecture are near the bottom of this page:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/showthread.php?t=105443The instruction set is supported by the recent Intel C/C++ and Fortran compilers. The GNU port was just to compile the Linux kernel and doesn't really support the new instructions.
