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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

#51

Post by hinkley »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #48
hinkley wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Roentgen and Retina displays are in the neighborhood of 200 ppi, which is about when laser printers became 'clear' and legible, which was the thesis behind Roentgen.

But now you've got smart phones pushing in the region of 400 PPI. It's smoother, and make Apple displays look like laggards. But they're beyond the point where most eyes notice the difference without magnification.

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

#53

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Regarding the application of memristors to AI, here's a bit of a dissenting opinion:

  Unfortunately for neuromorphics, just about everyone else in the semiconductor
  industry—including big players like Intel and Nvidia—also wants in on the
  deep-learning market. And that market might turn out to be one of the rare cases
  in which the incumbents, rather than the innovators, have the strategic
  advantage. That’s because deep learning, arguably the most advanced software on
  the planet, generally runs on extremely simple hardware.

  Karl Freund, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy who specializes in deep
  learning, said the key bit of computation involved in running a deep-learning
  system—known as matrix multiplication—can easily be handled with 16-bit and even
  8-bit CPU components, as opposed to the 32- and 64-bit circuits of an advanced
  desktop processor. In fact, most deep-learning systems use traditional silicon,
  especially the graphics coprocessors found in the video cards best known for
  powering video games. Graphics coprocessors can have thousands of cores, all
  working in tandem, and the more cores there are, the more efficient the
  deep-learning network.
From:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/neuromorphic...

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

#54

Post by zardo »

austin_y wrote: post #20
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…

Brings to mind images of Conway's Game of Life, with computations moving about a grid of memory as they create and destroy new bits of data.

Or Core War.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War

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

#55

Post by scientistem »

tboyd47 wrote: post #49

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?

I think this is most analagous to simd in terms of issueing a single computation over multiple words of data, which would work well for both zeroing data and operating on scalar arrays.

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

#56

Post by Alex3917 »

cududa wrote: post #36
nyolfen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never understood why people don't get more excited about memristors. personally, mostly because i've been seeing articles about how they're just about to totally upend computing for the last ten years

Pretty sure I first read about them in a PC World magazine I got at the airport on a family vacation in like 2003

As far as I know I submitted the first ever article about memristors to HN, which was this in 2008:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177865

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

#57

Post by Someone »

austin_y wrote: post #20
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…

Brings to mind images of Conway's Game of Life, with computations moving about a grid of memory as they create and destroy new bits of data.

And that brings to mind http://www.conwaylife.com/w/index.php?title=HashLife, an example (of many) of an algorithmic improvement that gives a way higher speed up than parallellizing and throwing hardware at a problem.

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

#58

Post by 1024core »

nyolfen wrote: post #24
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. personally, mostly because i've been seeing articles about how they're just about to totally upend computing for the last ten years

10 years? I've been seeing them hyped as the "next big thing" since the 90s. HP keeps pumping out press releases every so often.

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

#59

Post by WorldMaker »

cududa wrote: post #36
nyolfen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never understood why people don't get more excited about memristors. personally, mostly because i've been seeing articles about how they're just about to totally upend computing for the last ten years

Pretty sure I first read about them in a PC World magazine I got at the airport on a family vacation in like 2003

It's been a dream since the term was invented in 1971. HP Lab's big announcement that they had cracked memristors and they were right around the corner was in 2008 (which is quite nearly a decade ago now).

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

#60

Post by 1024core »

Alex3917 wrote: post #56
cududa wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure I first read about them in a PC World magazine I got at the airport on a family vacation in like 2003

As far as I know I submitted the first ever article about memristors to HN, which was this in 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177865

There was a world of media before HN, you know. Just saying.
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