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IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers

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Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers

#41

Post by hinkley »

Animats wrote: post #33
dTal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure. CPUs are stupidly fast, now - the bottleneck is virtually always the time it takes to move data in and out of memory. What if, instead of trying to bring the data to the calculation, you brought the calculation to the data? You could speed up everything . Fun to think about: in this scenario, the main job of an "optimizing compiler" would be to organize things spatially so that, as a calculation move…

This idea has come around many times, all the way back to the ILLIAC IV, Thinking Machines, and the NCube. The only commercial success is GPUs, which really do have elements with both compute and memory crunching away in parallel. Other pure-crunch appilcations have been found for GPUs and things like them. There are now GPU-like compute units for servers, although in many cases they're still GPUs, with frame buffers…

I think one could make a case for NUMA systems being a dilution if this concept. But my recollection of the Illiac IV was pretty much what I’d call a NUMA system.

Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers

#42

Post by randcraw »

dTal wrote: post #9
xellisx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well with most claims that generalize computing power, such as the title of this, it's mostly aimed at something more specialized. "The researchers believe this new prototype technology will enable ultra-dense, low-power, and massively parallel computing systems that are especially useful for AI applications." So it seems that would benefit AI/Machine Learning more than GP processing, from that statement.

I'm not so sure. CPUs are stupidly fast, now - the bottleneck is virtually always the time it takes to move data in and out of memory. What if, instead of trying to bring the data to the calculation, you brought the calculation to the data? You could speed up everything . Fun to think about: in this scenario, the main job of an "optimizing compiler" would be to organize things spatially so that, as a calculation move…

Computational memory can't speed up 'everything' because most software doesn't benefit from single operations that span a large chunk of data (AKA SIMD ops, as on GPUs). This technique will always improve only a small select fraction of present and future software, like games/graphics, video and voice processing, and general purpose vector operations (like tensor ops in deep learning).

Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers

#43

Post by deelowe »

hinkley wrote: post #34
tasty_freeze wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transistors provide something that resistors, capacitors, inductors and memristors don't, and thus they can't be replaced. That thing is gain, ie, amplification (of either voltage or current). All the others are lossy, so if you imagine some building block, then cascade N of them in a row, eventually the signal will become too weak (at some N) to be useful.

Do you remember when IBM sold off their hard drive research division? I was convinced this meant they knew memristors were going to kill hard drives soon and they were profit taking before killing them off. That’s been more than ten years now. I am still waiting, but made other plans.

In all fairness, the hd industry as a whole has shrunk considerably since. Same for servers and PCs. I think they made the right decision, but I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say they had a good strategy for what they would do once they got rid of these product lines.

Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers

#44

Post by MikeDoesCode »

Didn't HP design and I think prototype something like this with memristors, calling it 'The Machine'?

edit So HP built one with 160Tb of memory, I remember it being proposed with memristors but haven't been able to check if the prototype used them... Does anyone know what is different about IBM's that let's them claim this as a first though?

Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers

#45

Post by coldtea »

otakucode wrote: post #2

This is the promise of memristors. Despite innumerable articles being written about neuromorphic architectures like they'll be something miraculous, this ability to change from functioning as a bit of memory to being a bunch of functional logic on the fly at the speed of a memory read? That's going to be crazy. It will open up possibilities that we probably can't even imagine right now. I've never understood why peop…

>I've never understood why people don't get more excited about memristors

For the same reason they aren't excited about flying cars?

Because they wait until something is actually delivered that in a form they can use?

Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers

#46

Post by [deleted] »

MikeDoesCode wrote: post #44

Didn't HP design and I think prototype something like this with memristors, calling it 'The Machine'? edit So HP built one with 160Tb of memory, I remember it being proposed with memristors but haven't been able to check if the prototype used them... Does anyone know what is different about IBM's that let's them claim this as a first though?

[deleted]

Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers

#48

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

hinkley wrote: post #35
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm still waiting to be able to buy a 2000 ppi display like IBM's R&D announced creating back in the late 1990s or so... You're not thinking of this and mistakenly adding an extra 0, are you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors#His...

They were right. Retina displays aren’t even the high PPI ones anymore. They are the equivalent of second generation laser printers.

> They were right.

Who was right about what?

> They are the equivalent of second generation laser printers.

What does this even mean?

Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers

#49

Post by tboyd47 »

Are these benchmarks unusual to anyone else? Things like changing the color of all the black pixels in a bitmap simultaneously and performing correlations on historical rainfall data. Is it because this technology is more suitable for certain types of computations?

Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers

#50

Post by kensai »

stephengillie wrote: post #38
kensai wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best thing about memristors is that actually this is how the brain really works (at an electronical equivalence). There is no von Neumann architecture in our cortex, rather neurons in networks which both compute and store memories.

Neurons are routers that apply weights to their inputs.

I talked about the bigger picture, neurons IN NETWORKS.
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