[Libre-soc-dev] Simple-V svp64 draft spec

[Richard Wilbur]

On Jan 29, 2021, at 08:16, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
> 
> sorry, one important factor i missed out: the fundamental principle of SV
> is that it can be left "switched on" all the time, due to something known
> as "scalar identity behaviour".
> 
> all SPRs related to SV, when set to zero, result *automatically* in
> absolute full without exception 100% compliant v3.0B (scalar) behaviour.

This is part of what makes this vector implementation so elegant, and powerful!  It reminds me of the correspondence principle in physics where quantum mechanics at large scale simplifies to Newtonian mechanics.  Likewise relativity at slow speeds.

To draw from the other side of my educational heritage, the complex plane (a+bi) contains n solutions to every non-zero, single-variable, degree n polynomial with complex coefficients (by the fundamental theorem of algebra).  But the real numbers correspond to the line b=0 in the complex plane.

Id est, “Cool!”