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

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

#81

Post by santaboom »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #73

From a position of naive curiosity -- Would this work as a coprocessor, take the most inefficient/most optimisable procedures and compile (#) them for the fabric? It would you lose all your gains in turn being extra processes to ship data between cores/processors? How 2D is it: compiling to a fabric sounds like it needs lots of difficult routing. 3D would seem like it would make the routing much more compact?

Perhaps instead you are referring to the program graphs and whether they are better represented as hyper graphs [0] with certain regular edges within a 2D layer and hyper edges between 2D layers? If so, good question and I am not sure if the answer, I agree that it would probably be a helpful abstraction layer to assist with certain data locality and reduce data movement + congestion issues. [0] https://lasttheory.com/article/what-is-a-hypergraph-in-wolfr...

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

#82

Post by drcongo »

elseless wrote: post #39
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #26

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 com…

You managed to explain that in a way that even I could understand. Magnificent, thank you.

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

#83

Post by TickleSteve »

nubinetwork wrote: post #80

100x more efficient at what cost? If it's slower than a Pentium 2, nobody's gonna want it, except for the embedded users...

there are orders of magnitudes more embedded processor sales than desktop CPUs.... So the answer really is... lots of people will want it.

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

#84

Post by djmips »

gchadwick wrote: post #65
reactordev wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a design flaw or a tooling flaw? The dev experience is usually left till the very end of some proof like this.

Both? Theoretically amazing hardware that just needs the magic compiler to work well is a well worn path in the hardware world (The itanium being a notable example). A design can be impossible to compile well for and very hard to program manually if it hasn't been developed well. Equally you can indeed have a bad toolchain for that hard to use design making it even harder to get the best out of it.

I'm thinking of the Sony Toshiba IBM Cell processor. In the end with experience you could deliver impressive performance and the lessons learned proved to be valuable on any multi core system. But everyone knows the reputation that the PS3 had and certainly in retrospect it was challenging to say the least.

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

#85

Post by JJJollyjim »

bmenrigh wrote: post #31
artemonster wrote: post #21

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.

Especially the fact that he says the toolchain is now available for download (which lends credibility – if they're willing to share it so people can see the quality of output it produces), when in fact the website has no download links.

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

#87

Post by petermcneeley »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #86

The high level description reninded me of Tilera. They've probably had the most industrial use in these segments. https://www.cas-well.com/applications/tilera-the-many-core-s...

I think this is more like an fpga than simply a bunch of cores arranged in a fabric.

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

#88

Post by DesiLurker »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #17

This is a CGRA. It's like an FPGA but with bigger cells. It's not a VLIW core. I assume that like all past attempts at this, it's about 20x more efficient when code fits in the one array (FPGAs get this ratio), but if your code size grows past something very trivial, the grid config needs to switch and that costs tons of time and power.

I recall Mathstar's FPOA (field programmable object arrays) have had similar architecture. it seems they have done a mixture of stack computer, this and some async programming to get this level of optimization. The other one I had seen with pretty good on chip fabric was Tilera who were using something like a packet switch to interconnect tonnes of on-chip cores.

My first reaction watching this video was that they are just shifting the problem to compiler, which is actually worse and also does not works for dynamic code with tonnes of branches. Also, didnt Intel burn a lot of money trying to do this with Itanium?

Overall, interesting idea but I filed it under 'solution looking for a problem' desk.

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

#89

Post by ethan_smith »

variadix wrote: post #29

Pretty interesting concept, though as other commenters have pointed out the efficiency gains likely break down once your program doesn’t fit onto the mesh all at once. Also this looks like it requires a “sufficiently smart compiler”, which isn’t a good sign either. The need to do routing etc. reminds me of the problems FPGAs have during place and route (effectively the minimum cut problem on a graph, i.e. NP), hopefu…

This is essentially a CGRA (Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array) architecture, which historically has shown impressive efficiency in academic research but struggled with compilation complexity and commercial adoption precisely because of the NP-hard routing problems you've identified.

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

#90

Post by reactordev »

djmips wrote: post #84
gchadwick wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both? Theoretically amazing hardware that just needs the magic compiler to work well is a well worn path in the hardware world (The itanium being a notable example). A design can be impossible to compile well for and very hard to program manually if it hasn't been developed well. Equally you can indeed have a bad toolchain for that hard to use design making it even harder to get the best out of it.

I'm thinking of the Sony Toshiba IBM Cell processor. In the end with experience you could deliver impressive performance and the lessons learned proved to be valuable on any multi core system. But everyone knows the reputation that the PS3 had and certainly in retrospect it was challenging to say the least.

Nah, the issue with PS3 was everyone coming from a specific set of instructions and having, that, hard wired into their brains. Yes, the cell processor did things differently but it was us engineers who had to learn to think of a world beyond x86. This was a good thing. It let us learn. And when Arm came around, we were ready.
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