This is the next wave of technology. It solves so many fundamental problems. I can't wait to have a few GiB of MRAM in a workstation.
Load/store architectures may go away due to this. Imagine 32Gb of CPU registers.
Load/store architectures may go away due to this. Imagine 32Gb of CPU registers.
Sounds like the most expensive context switch ever.
Anyway, I fail to see the point of this discussion, TFA states that MRAM attains speed comparable to that of the DRAM, which is much slower than CPU cache (at least one or two orders of magnitude slower), so that won't go away just now.
Also, the article speaks of "write speeds" (whatever that means) of tenth of nanoseconds but says nothing of latency. I suppose there are no refresh periods, which might improve over DRAM a little. It all seems very vague so far, I'm looking forward for some more technical and all-encompassing performance numbers.
Amazon is a big player with AWS and this is the perfect opportunity for someone to come in and eat their lunch and change everything.
The good news is we don't need hard disk any more. This will indeed change a lot of what we know about operating system.
My point is to remove the distinction between the register file and the main memory so that the entire CPU's working set is linear and no copies are required, therefore drastically increasing speed.
When you do this, you lose all the cache control latency and context switch overhead, resulting in a much smaller and faster core, leaving plenty of space for 32Gb on die :)
No existing architectures will do this as they rely on the memory hierarchy. I'm talking about a new architecture.
That has been tried several times before. As long as small is "enough faster", small&fast+large+overhead beats large. (In really fast processors, active register values are lots of places, so they don't even access the register file except for values that haven't been used for a while.)
> When you do this, you lose all the cache control latency and context switch overhead, resulting in a much smaller and faster core,
Huh? Context switch overhead is time, not space. Cache control is negligible space.
> leaving plenty of space for 32Gb on die :)
Not yet you don't. None of this stuff is as dense as dram and DRAM is just now hitting 4Gbit. Since fast processors do take some space....