Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How? The first memristor was created in 2008.
The concept goes back to at least '71
IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers
81–90 of 138 posts
Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How? The first memristor was created in 2008.
It took at least that long to go from the theorized device to the first prototype.
Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
How? The first memristor was created in 2008.
The concept goes back to at least '71 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1083337/
Correct on concept, but up until 2008 nobody produced one reliably.
You can find references and hints to them all the way back to maxwell's day. They tended to be regarded as anomalous circuits back then however.
Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers
#84For god's sake. I've been pitching this for years .. I can't sigh hard enough.
That's how I feel. I used FPGAs in the late 90s and wanted to try making a parallel chip with say 1024 cores and a few K of RAM per core and then program it with something like Erlang. Then the dot bomb happened, then the housing bomb, the Great Recession, and so on and so forth. The big players got more entrenched so everything was evolutionary instead of revolutionary and I'd say computer engineering (my major, nev…
So true. Also, the transputer. The tech is catching up. FPGAs, cores on graphics cards. Different implementations, same patterns as late 90s tech.
Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers
#85Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers
#86Would this be classified as MIMD?
Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There is a lot more to screen quality than PPI. Color fidelity, refresh rates, etc. Retina was great when other displays weren't, now that most devices have retina level displays going beyond that level isn't adding as much as making sure your color reproduction is accurate and your device can update the screen in a rate fast enough that animations don't judder.
I will say I'm perfectly happy with the PPI on Apple devices. If I seemed to be condoning the people chasing numbers to increase sales, that wasn't my intention.
I do joke though that some day Apple will introduce iGlasses, which will be AR glasses with electronically adjustable refractive indexes. When it detects a smartphone in front of your field of view it will zoom in 2x and do image stabilization so you can see your 500 ppi screen.
Like a high tech version of the computers in Brazil...
Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. There might be clever ways to make a particular circuit dual purpose or something (Storage element that can do math on itself? A math pipeline that doesn't need pipeline flops?) B…
FPGA reprogramming is slow. It's like saying we can make more oil because all we have to do is wait a few hundreds million years for all our plant matter to rot. And correct me if I'm wrong, but can you even reprogram an FPGA while it is actively being used? I don't believe so. Much less reprogram it from the gates which are active.
Obviously FPGA is not as slick & fast as a memristor chip could maybe be, but if the economics of a morphic processor made sense wouldn't you expect to see FPGA coprocessors and a library of utility bitstreams to be dynamically loaded as needed?
Of course, the reason we don't see that is the economics aren't great, the performance boost isn't either, and developing those utility bitstreams is a herculean task by itself.
The real world incarnation of all this I would argue is the SoC. Silicon is cheap enough you don't make one mighty morphic chip; you make several dedicated IP's and put them all on one chip.
Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers
#89Earlier 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.
They sold it when hard drives became a commodity item - generally commodity items don't get major R&D attached to them.
Re: IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not an expert on this, but I think you might be thinking of nvram/non volatile RAM, "memristor" is a portmanteau of memory and transistor, so I'd expect that they have properties of both.
Actually it's a portmanteau of "memory" and "resistor". That's important since it's basically a variable resistance resistor that "remembers" its resistance.
Ah ha, thanks for the correction!