A huge SIMD core should have a die area advantage (which in turn gives it other advantages) over a bunch of little processors of the same "width" executing instructions independently. And there is less overhead.

In exchange, it can't process different instruction streams simultaneously. It has to perform the same operations over a giant chunk data, or otherwise "waste" the huge SIMD width.

Another highlight of this thing:

> There is also extensive support for predication with 8 predication registers. The unit is optimized for 8-bit integers (9-bit calculations)

From everything I read, NCore would have been a low price LLM monster. Centaur would probably be alive and selling them like hotcakes if they came out with it now, instead if then.

Would have? What do you mean?

This SoC was, unfortunately, never really used, Centaur shut down and IIRC Intel bought the remains.

Which is a shame, as it was really cool. And it was x86!

They all run the same instruction, so I'm not actually sure if the slices matter much.