The big one coming up is the doubling of the integer registers from 16 to 32 in skylake. Which should be interesting in emulation scenarios and code that is kind of knarly.
The only source I can find for that is Wikipedia, with the edit made by an anonymous user. Do you have anything a little bit more authoritative than that? 16 seems to be close to the sweet spot for integer registers, with enough that modern register allocation algorithms can do a good job, but not so many that context switches are overly expensive.
No, they're saying that you can't just take their research and make claims that it doesn't substantiate and then appeal to their authority to support your claims.
To give a computer science analogy (I'm out of stock of car analogies), imagine that you worked on Hadoop and you'd made sorting large data sets go 50% faster. Then someone publishes a book arguing that P=NP and uses your result (which doesn't even do comparison-based sorting) as the basis for their claim. You'd be in pretty much the same position as the researchers in TFA. Would you say that the author is an idiot, or would you keep quiet?
So they make very crappy tools. For the record, we want good quality (no crashing, sensible error messages (not "unknown error")) command line tools, like how normal compilers work.
I have here a log file containing the output from a command-line build of our CPU using the Altera tools. This file is 10460 lines long. The relevant information it contains can be summarised as: No errors, passed timing.
Occasionally, we've had serious issues reported (the reset line on the ethernet MAC wasn't connected, so ended up being set high, which cost us over a week of time debugging the driver and trying to discover why the FIFOs weren't behaving correctly), but they're hidden in so much noise that there's absolutely no chance that a human will ever see them. They're not differentiated from trivial warnings that no one will ever care about.
In the software world, we've (with my Clang developer hat on) learned that warnings have to have a low false-positive rate or you end up with everyone ignoring them. We therefore expect reasonable developers to be able to set -Werror on large codebases and fix everything that breaks the build. If your code doesn't build with -Werror, then it's a big warning sign.
In the FPGA world, thousands of warnings (and even more 'information' lines) in the output are normal for any nontrivial build.
Physician: One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well. -- Ambrose Bierce