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Comment by valarauca1 | Hacker News Reader

Two things immediately jump out

    Custom ISA extensions for deep learning, communication, and cryptography
    DARPA/MTO
    autonomous drones cognitive radio

The radar geeks are gonna love to get their hands on ~250GFLOP, 4watt processor.

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I'm seeing NIDS for 10+Gbit links, DDOS mitigation, cache appliance for web servers, Erlang accelerator, BitTorrent accelerator, and so on. Quite a few possibilities. Also, something like this might be tuned for hardware synthesis, formal verification, or testing given all the resources that requires. Intel has a nice presentation showing what kind of computing resources go into their CPU work:

https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/docum...

I don't believe the chip has enough I/O for a 10Gb nic.

The issue is not bandwidth, it's the system cost. The chip has 1024 IO pins. (more than enough for MANY 10Gb nics...)

"The issue is not bandwidth, it's the system cost."

What does that mean?

I have a naive question based in my dreams:

Is possible to design a CPU that ON-DEMAND switch between parallel and linear operation? So, if we have a 1000 cores, it switch to 10 with the linear power of 10 x 10?

In my dreams this was very usefull, but wonder how feasible clould be ;)

Sure: it's called a superscalar CPU.

No.

Basically the limiting factor in most designs isn't so much arithmetic as fetches and branches. Especially cache misses. Theses are inherently linear operations - if you need to fetch from memory and then jump based on the result, for example.

Superscalar 'cheats' somewhat by spending area to keep the pipeline fed, through branch prediction and suchlike.

The nearest thing is the graphics card, which has a very large number of arithmetic units but less flow control, so you can run the same subroutine on lots of different data in parallel.

Highly multicore chips make a different tradeoff: external memory bandwidth is very limited. Ideal for video codecs etc where you can take a small chunk and chew heavily. Very bad for running random unadapted C code, Java etc.

There has been a bunch of academic research about this topic under names like core fusion and dynamic multicore. A recent sample: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

yes. It's called FPGA.

This is sort of what Hyperthreading is. Though you'll notice the ratios are not as good as what you want.

Could be excellent for a dense automatic isolating array microphone; thousand other things. I'd love to see Parallella in embedded, they set a great example.

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