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Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

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Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#71

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.

Have you actually been to a DARPA kickoff? I guarantee you that 90-95% of the stuff that they are funding will not be broadly useful in 10 years.

The stuff that DARPA gets right is building stealth planes and prosthetics, arpa-net was a one-off exception in their history.

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#73
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ).

But logic and SRAM are more compatible. I'm still curious because multiple processors having random access to a large memory is not easy. The scratchpad they mention sounds like a cache, but maybe it's something more than that.

'scratchpad' implies they are directly addressable, i guess you could say a software controlled cache.

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just a formality. The implementation is trivial and left to the reader of any good DARPA project as an exercise.

Killing the wrong people isn't DARPA's problem, we have bombs that we can drop out of a plane and down a chimney. Blame the elected officials that ordered the bomb dropped in the first place and the intelligence apparatus that convinced them it was good idea.

And the venal election system that put them in charge, and the social order that creates vast power and wealth imbalances.

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#76
post #49

How is this different than FORTH processors, like http://www.greenarraychips.com/ http://www.forth.org/cores.html http://www.ultratechnology.com/chips.htm https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/euroforth2007/papers... http://wiki.c2.com/?ChuckMoore etc.

Those do stack based computation?

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Versus, what? No public funding? No private utilization of public research? Public research should fall in the public domain, free of IP and open for any use. If anything, we should be doing more of this... create dedicated academic R&D funding streams by taxing established or dying industries in order to publicly explore new fields, and use X Prize-style programs or NASA's COTS/CRS programs to incentivize private co…

"Versus, what? No public funding? No private utilization of public research?" Versus the taxpayer-funded I.P. being licensed to all parties in the country that funded it with the big corporations being forced to compete on better implementations delivered faster to customers. Big players can try to make billions, small players can innovate on top of same I.P. without a lawsuit, and individuals can even attempt to hom…

There is no sign in the article that only Intel and Qualcomm will have rights to the new design.

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#78
I'm happy to see that a group from Georgia Tech is working on this. Actually, my group just sent in a proposal for the DARPA SSITH[1] program. The high-level goal of SSITH is to design low-level (firmware or hardware) protection techniques that can guard against common software vulnerabilities that lead to hardware exploitation.

[1]: http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2017-04-10

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#79
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way; this is the kind of thing that can become a state-secret level advantage. Seriously, it's a graph processor. Graph analysis is basically the entire job of a modern intelligence agency. There's a cold-war level arms race going on in cybersecurity. Russia embarrassed us with their sophisticated cyberwarfare capability in the last election -- they were able to infiltrate both campaigns AND the FBI (they used fal…

> Russia embarrassed us with their sophisticated cyberwarfare capability in the last election I'm still unclear how "sophisticated" these attacks were. Per the unclassified information, all I've heard mentioned is: 1. social media manipulation 2. traditional media manipulation (RT) 3. email spearphishing None of the above strikes me as particularly sophisticated, even if it's potentially effective. (I don't know if i…

Sophistication means technical complexity, but also scale. Certainly social-media manipulation requires a large-scale approach to make it feasible.

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#80

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

You mean that private corporations can somehow just sit there and collect rent from this publicly funded research? Amazing!

"Intel [assuming Intel wins] will also have the rights to productize versions for the worldwide market." This means that Intel gets exclusive license for the tech they didn't pay for, and no one else can use it even though all taxpayers funded it.
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