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Efficient Computer's Electron E1 CPU – 100x more efficient than Arm?

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31–40 of 113 posts

Re: Efficient Computer's Electron E1 CPU – 100x more efficient than Arm?

#31

As a person who is highly vested and interested in CPU space, especially embedded, I am HIGHLY skeptical of such claims. Somebody played TIS-100, remembered GA144 failed and decided to try their own. You know what can be a simple proof of your claims? No, not a press release. No, not a pitch deck or a youtube video. And NO, not even working silicon, you silly. A SIMPLE FUCKING ISA EMULATOR WITH A PROFILER. Instead we…

I like Ian but he’s rapidly losing credibility by postings so much sponsored content. Many of his videos and articles now are basically just press releases.

Re: Efficient Computer's Electron E1 CPU – 100x more efficient than Arm?

#32

> Efficient’s goal is to approach the problem by static scheduling and control of the data flow - don’t buffer, but run. No caches, no out-of-order design, but it’s also not a VLIW or DSP design. It’s a general purpose processor. Sounds like a mainframe. Is there any similarity?

This has nothing to do with mainframes (which are fairly normal general purpose computers).

Re: Efficient Computer's Electron E1 CPU – 100x more efficient than Arm?

#33

As a person who is highly vested and interested in CPU space, especially embedded, I am HIGHLY skeptical of such claims. Somebody played TIS-100, remembered GA144 failed and decided to try their own. You know what can be a simple proof of your claims? No, not a press release. No, not a pitch deck or a youtube video. And NO, not even working silicon, you silly. A SIMPLE FUCKING ISA EMULATOR WITH A PROFILER. Instead we…

There's >20 years of academic research behind dataflow architectures going back to TRIPS and MIT RAW. It's not literally a scam but the previous versions weren't practical and it's unlikely this version succeeds either. I agree that if the compiler was good they would release it and if they don't release it that's probably because it isn't good.

Re: Efficient Computer's Electron E1 CPU – 100x more efficient than Arm?

#35

As a person who is highly vested and interested in CPU space, especially embedded, I am HIGHLY skeptical of such claims. Somebody played TIS-100, remembered GA144 failed and decided to try their own. You know what can be a simple proof of your claims? No, not a press release. No, not a pitch deck or a youtube video. And NO, not even working silicon, you silly. A SIMPLE FUCKING ISA EMULATOR WITH A PROFILER. Instead we…

The 2022 PhD thesis linked from their web site includes a picture of what they claim was an actual chip made using a 22nm process. I understand that the commercial chip might be different, but it is possible that the measurements made for the thesis could be valid for their future products as well.

Re: Efficient Computer's Electron E1 CPU – 100x more efficient than Arm?

#36
post #34

Sounds a lot like GreenArray GA144 ( https://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/GA144.ht... )! Sadly, without a bizarre and proprietary FORTH dialect to call its own, I fear the E1 will not have the market traction of its predecessor.

That was my first thought too. I really like the idea of interconnected nodes array. There's something biological, thinking in topology and neighbours diffusion that I find appealing.

Re: Efficient Computer's Electron E1 CPU – 100x more efficient than Arm?

#37

Is this the return if Itanium? static scheduling and pushing everything to the compiler it sounds like it.

It kinda sounds like it, though the article explicitly said it's not VLIW. I've always felt like itanium was a great idea but came too soon and too poorly executed. It seemed like the majority of the commercial failure came down to friction from switching architecture and the inane pricing rather than the merits of the architecture itself. Basically intel being intel.

It does feel maybe like the world has changed a bit now that LLVM is ubiquitous with its intermediate representation form being available for specialized purposes. Translation from IR to a VLIW plan should be easier now than the state of compiler tech in the 90s.

But "this is a good idea just poorly executed" seems to be the perennial curse of VLIW, and how Itanium ended up shoved onto people in the first place.

Re: Efficient Computer's Electron E1 CPU – 100x more efficient than Arm?

#38

Pardon me but could somebody here explain to me like I am 15? Because I guess Its late night and I can't go into another rabbithole and I guess I would appreciate it. Cheers and good night fellow HN users.

Found this video a good explanation. https://youtu.be/xuUM84dvxcY?si=VPBEsu8wz70vWbX4

Re: Efficient Computer's Electron E1 CPU – 100x more efficient than Arm?

#39

Pardon me but could somebody here explain to me like I am 15? Because I guess Its late night and I can't go into another rabbithole and I guess I would appreciate it. Cheers and good night fellow HN users.

Sure. You can think of a (simple) traditional CPU as executing instructions in time, one-at-a-time[1] — it fetches an instruction, decodes it, performs an arithmetic/logical operation, or maybe a memory operation, and then the instruction is considered to be complete.

The Efficient architecture is a CGRA (coarse-grained reconfigurable array), which means that it executes instructions in space instead of time. At compile time, the Efficient compiler looks at a graph made up of all the “unrolled” instructions (and data) in the program, and decides how to map it all spatially onto the hardware units. Of course, the graph may not all fit onto the hardware at once, in which case it must also be split up to run in batches over time. But the key difference is that there’s this sort of spatial unrolling that goes on.

This means that a lot of the work of fetching and decoding instructions and data can be eliminated, which is good. However, it also means that the program must be mostly, if not completely, static, meaning there’s a very limited ability for data-dependent branching, looping, etc. to occur compared to a CPU. So even if the compiler claims to support C++/Rust/etc., it probably does not support, e.g., pointers or dynamically-allocated objects as we usually think of them.

[1] Most modern CPUs don’t actually execute instructions one-at-a-time — that’s just an abstraction to make programming them easier. Under the hood, even in a single-core CPU, there is all sorts of reordering and concurrent execution going on, mostly to hide the fact that memory is much slower to access than on-chip registers and caches.

Re: Efficient Computer's Electron E1 CPU – 100x more efficient than Arm?

#40
post #36
post #34

Sounds a lot like GreenArray GA144 ( https://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/GA144.ht... )! Sadly, without a bizarre and proprietary FORTH dialect to call its own, I fear the E1 will not have the market traction of its predecessor.

That was my first thought too. I really like the idea of interconnected nodes array. There's something biological, thinking in topology and neighbours diffusion that I find appealing.

One day someone will get it working...

Data transfer is slow and power hungry - it's obvious that putting a little bit of compute next to every bit of memory is the way to minimize data transfer distance.

The laws of physics can't be broken, yet people demand more and more performance, so eventually the difficulty of solving this issue will be worth solving.

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