Chippy

Chippy is a new CPU architecture and ISA, built from scratch with no legacy baggage. The idea is simple to state: treat isolation, acceleration, and analyzability as architectural problems, and solve them in the instruction set itself rather than layering fixes on afterward. Containers and virtual machines are where this pays off most. What other architectures emulate, Chippy provides natively.

Design goals

Low-cost isolation

Sandboxes, containers, and VMs are cheap hardware constructs, and they nest. Spinning one up should feel closer to a function call than a ceremony.

A precise compiler target

No legacy modes, no undefined corners. Behavior is pinned down at the instruction set, and the atomics and memory model match what modern languages actually assume. In practice that makes it a nearly perfect target for LLVM and for higher-level languages like Rust.

Architectural security boundaries

Authority is granted explicitly and stays small enough to reason about formally.

Confidential execution on third-party infrastructure

Run your workload on someone else's hardware without trusting them. That's the whole pitch. Isolation isn't a feature you turn on, it's just how the machine works, and a tenant who trusts nobody gets something they can verify instead of a vendor's word.

Analyzable real-time behavior

System operations take bounded time, so worst-case guarantees are something you engineer, not something you measure and hope.

Owner sovereignty

The machine answers to whoever owns it. Everything else follows from that. Every key can be read and replaced. Attestation serves the owner's verifier, nobody else's. No vendor-privileged channels. Drivers, documentation, firmware: free all the way down.

Who it's for

• People and organizations who need their systems to actually be secure.
• Anyone who thinks owning a machine should mean owning it.
• Builders chasing things most computers simply cannot do.