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Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

eetimes.com

31–40 of 101 posts

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#31
The way that they describe sparse graph processing in memory sounds like the kind of pointer chasing that makes run-time object-oriented programming memory access patterns slow.

I wonder if that was a translation to PR artifact, or if there might be something there to accelerate some of the Java or .Net memory access patterns that we all use.

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#32

Can't wait for this publicly funded research to make some private corporation billions!

If it annoys you that much, stop using internet, throw away your laptop and pretty much everything else in your life. No need to support these "evil private corporations". Yeah, really. I'm sure you can do it.

What? Not so good idea anymore? It's funny how ironic and shortsighted these HN commies are.

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#33

Can't wait for this publicly funded research to make some private corporation billions!

You mean like the internet? Or self driving cars?

The "Internet" would've happened regardless, Xerox's Parc Project and their "Parc Universal Packet" is one example.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_Universal_Packet

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#35
My guess at what's driving this need, is for intelligence agencies to make sense of and traverse the large and complicated graphs that are used to map real world relationships.

As they collect more data related to this, they'll need better ways to traverse these graphs.

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#36

Can't wait for this publicly funded research to make some private corporation billions!

Not sure if sarcastic or sincere. You can damn near predict what will be the future tech 10 years down the line based on what DARPA is doing to make killing more efficient.

does killing the RIGHT people count as efficient?

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#37

Sounds a lot like the Cell in concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)

The SPUs on the Cell were closer in concept to DSPs than they are to what the article describes. The Cell chip itself was essentially a general-purpose CPU joined in silicon to several DSPs.

The SPUs are still designed for sequential processing of memory, just smaller, discrete blocks. The whole chip is orchestrated by a standard von Neumann processor anyway, so that acts as a bottleneck to keeping the SPUs busy.

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#38

Is it just me or is the illustration of 'graphs' of totally the wrong kind of graphs? I'm sure they don't mean bar charts.

Yeah, a bit embarrassing for a magazine that covers technology, HIVE defintely works on graph-theory graphs. Even weirder is the (Source: DARPA) attribution.

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#39
post #9
post #5

What does the memory interface look like for this? None of the papers I can find indicate how you can get so much parallelism out of the CPU memory interface. An interesting approach to non-Von Neumann computing is to put ALUs in memory, to take advantage of the fact that DRAMs have far more internal bandwidth than what is exposed in traditional systems: http://researcher.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-leejinho/tvlsi...…

Manufacturing logic on the same wafer as DRAM is difficult since the processes are so different. On the other hand, manufacturing on separate dies and connecting with an interposer or TSVs gets you tremendous bandwidth and relatively low latency; this is how some newer generation graphics memory is implemented (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bandwidth_Memory ).

CPU logic on DRAM process is apparently a solved problem: http://venraytechnology.com/Implementations.htm

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#40

Can't wait for this publicly funded research to make some private corporation billions!

If it annoys you that much, stop using internet, throw away your laptop and pretty much everything else in your life. No need to support these "evil private corporations". Yeah, really. I'm sure you can do it. What? Not so good idea anymore? It's funny how ironic and shortsighted these HN commies are.

> It's funny how ironic and shortsighted these HN commies are.

The hilarious part is that you don't appear to be complaining about the government funding of research part.

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