Micron Automata Processor – A Brief Introduction
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Bad: Doesn't mention all the research that was done on these sorts of things already. I mean, it makes a great story that you invented the whole thing from scratch, but nothing screams "this is a slick marketing doc" more than pretending that sort of thing. Or maybe they did ignore the literature and made a bunch of mistakes as a result?
Edit: wow, the scientific paper does the same thing.
For example: "In the 1980s, a tiny CPU that executed FORTH was fabricated into a DRAM chip to improve PUSH and POP. FORTH is a Stack-oriented programming language and this improved its efficiency."
I would love to see a reference there. Anybody know one? If it only had pop and push, I wouldn't call it a processor in memory. I wouldn't say the MuP21 (http://www.ultratechnology.com/p21.html#p21) or F21 (http://www.ultratechnology.com/f21cpu.html) had a processor in memory, either.
Aside: I Googled for this (mythical?) CPU and did not find it, but I did find the next hot thing in agile programming: "Initially OKAD was implemented as the only application program in OK and was an experiment in sourceless programming. The structure of the programs looks like Forth code, but there was no Forth compiler or interpreter except Chuck himself. He entered the kernel of OK using a debugger and built the tools he need to build the rest of OK and OKAD" (http://www.ultratechnology.com/okad.htm)
Somebody should start a project where your system runs compiled Forth code, and the only way to backup the system is through a command that retrieve a set of functions from another running system ("please replace the 'BEEP' function with the one on the system at this IP address")
There's plenty of alternatives for Forth hardware, especially if you are willing to use a FOGA. What this describes is more like Moore's GreenArray hardware, but with way more, less powerful chips (if it were DRAM-like, a major difference would be that you would be able to address all those CPUs from the outside, not just a few, like in the GreenArray chips)
The idea of cellular automata was first developed by von Neumann and his colleagues back in the 1940s.
[1] Number of locations to search depends on associativity of the cache. I used 4 way associative cache in my example.
Is that what you're describing? Are you saying Micron invented some form of CAM?
Let's face it, Moore's Law is dead. Now we must extract the sub-exponential gains that come from architecture optimizations, and Non-uniform memory can lead to huge ones.
It's time to finally take the challenge of programming such exotic kinds of computers. The good news is that now our computers are good enough to help us.
What makes you say that? Intel would certainly disagree...
Although not the original formulation (which was number of transistors), the clock speed one is very significant because it means that sequential computations are no longer getting faster exponentially.
The forms of Moore's Law that remain are still being used advantageously by Intel, e.g. for more cores amongst lots of other things, but it's not helping as much, since not all computations can be parallelized.
Clock speed is generally not a good indicator of a processor performance. I'm guessing a single 2GHz Haswell core is faster than 4GHz P4, due to a number of significant architectural improvements, which were made possible by the larger number of transistors available.
Keep in mind that processor performance per watt continues to improve significantly every two years, with no sign of slowing down in the nearest future.
You can't dictate that to the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#Other_formulations_...
> Clock speed is generally not a good indicator of a processor performance.
I didn't say it was. But if all else is equal, the exact same architecture running at a doubled clock frequency will run exactly twice as fast as the original.
You are arguing that not all else is usually equal, and although true, it's a different topic.
The point is that the "free" doubling of speed that we used to get stopped some years back.
Computation per watt is another important subject -- but it is s a different topic (and for that matter, is yet another formulation of Moore's Law).
There are a thousand issues that are important to varying degrees when discussing architecture and performance, but there is no point acting like we don't know what people mean when they say "Moore's Law has failed". What they mean is quite clear.
> there is no point acting like we don't know what people mean when they say "Moore's Law has failed". What they mean is quite clear.
When I read "Moore's Law is dead", I thought the OP meant we can't shrink transistors any more. You can probably agree it is not the same as saying "clock speeds are not improving anymore".
If someone says "Moore's Law" I will assume they mean "number of transistors on a chip doubles every 2 years or so". If they mean something else, such as "clock speed doubles every 2 years", then they use the term incorrectly. Moore's Law is alive and well, and if you talk to people who actually work on extending it, you should use the correct terminology.
It's dead.
If you go back one and half cycle, you'll see that it does not add to a doubling for any big manufacturer. But what's most troubling is that the rate of increase is going down.
Yep, that happened in the past, and manufacturers recovered (altough not for so long). But this time it's different. We are very near the limits of MOSFET created on silicon by lithography, and we are so invested on this technology that I doubt we'll be able to transition quickly into anything else.
People have been saying that for decades. Experts claimed it would be impossible to shrink transistors below 1 micron. When that was done, other experts claimed it's impossible to shrink below 100nm.
Yes, Intel does not know how to build 5nm transistors, which are 3 process generations away from the current state of the art (14nm - 10nm - 7nm - 5nm). It's always been like that - for example, when Intel released 90nm technology, they didn't know how to do 22nm.
Yes, a new paradigm or substrate might be required to get there, so what? There's no shortage of new ideas, or new materials. Graphene is looking pretty good. Can't shrink it below atomic dimensions? Put another layer on top!
The only thing that can kill Moore's Law is lack of demand. But as long as people want faster, more efficient computers, they will be getting faster and more efficient. And I don't see the demand decreasing any time soon.
Whoops.
If something grows 10% a year for 10 years, it actually ends up at 2.59x its original size.
But, this is killer for SOHO networking IMHO. Puts a ton of power into the next wave of network security.
Pattern algorithms are pretty difficult to synthesize however, see the Conway Glider search as an example. One of the challenges is that the set of 'instructions' and the solution possibilities are quite tightly interlinked. I hope that I can get my hands on one at some point, some of the old texture research from the Image Processing Institute would really fly on this thing.
(I also upvoted you ... you shouldn't get penalized for an honest question)
I don't generally make excuses when I apologize because I think it diminishes the value of the apology itself. In this case I think it's fair to admit I thought he was trolling (and apparently so did his down-voters).
In any case, hopefully I'll be a better man tomorrow ... iron sharpens iron.
ps: the explanation for my quick oneliner is that I often see very limited protocols (say FTP, or SMTP) that require many round trip over the wire where it would now (I understand back in the days servers were anemic) make sense to distribute the computation a little on both side. Not unlike memory IMHO.