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

morethanmoore.substack.com

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

#91

Post by reactordev »

wmf wrote: post #64
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.

It doesn't matter. You have to get both right or you go out of business. (And then your IP is thrown away so the next startup also has to get both right...)

Yeah, merely asking for posterity in case someone wants to iterate on it. The dev tools need just as much attention as the hardware. Sometimes the community can surprise you. Take fritzing for example. I think the hardware design is novel but to benchmark it fully requires dev tooling that knows how to utilize it all, and in such a way that it abstracts those details from the average developer.

A good example of this is abstracting SIMD instructions for vector multiplication, or CUDA with torch. Normal people don’t care how it’s done, only that it’s done, as fast as can be done.

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

#92

Post by djmips »

reactordev wrote: post #90
djmips wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very much agree. It was a positive experience.

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

#93

Post by VonTum »

torginus wrote: post #72
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.

Yeah, I have worked with FPGAs a while ago and still casually follow the space. There have been many attempts of mapping general purpose/GPU programming languages to FPGA and none of them worked out. The first leading claim they make - that this is a general purpose CPU, capable of executing anything - I suspect is false. CPUs are hard because they have to interact with memory, basically 95% of CPU design complexity…

In academia people use general purpose languages (Notably C++ dialects) for FPGA design quite a lot. And there's definitely a glut of papers published on the development of such "High Level Synthesis" tools.

In order to use the FPGA efficiently you need to first pipeline the logic deeply, but then also be able to fill that pipeline.

But in my opinion there is just too much of an impedance mismatch between the "do one thing and then the next" style of imperative code, and the "everything everywhere all at once" way in which FPGAs actually work.

And well, here's my plug for my language that gets close to HLS in terms of syntactic ease, while still retaining full control over the generated hardware: https://github.com/pc2/sus-compiler

By explicitly keeping track of pipelining in submodules the compiler automatically balances the pipelines your create, and in addition, you can write modules that respond to the pipeline distance between their ports, and infer their parameters based on that. That fixes one of the most error-prone activities when designing hardware in SV or other languages.

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

#94

Post by 3836293648 »

esperent wrote: post #62
elseless wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Naively that sounds similar to a GPU. Is it?

No? GPUs are just extremely parallel much wider SIMD cores

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

#95

Post by actionfromafar »

santaboom wrote: post #76
actionfromafar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then I have a thought experiment. Replace the execution cores on a state of the art GPU and CPU with FPGAs.

See amdahls law Edit: [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

Yes but we are also talking about energy efficiency

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

#96

Post by IanCutress »

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.

This content wasn't sponsored. I spent time with the CEO and listened to his explanations, and did some digging of my own. I reported on the announcement and added in some of my own thoughts and opinions. I spent a decade doing exactly this at AnandTech, but now it's in video form (or on my substack).

So I'm not really sure where you're getting that feeling from. I've always done this. If I do sponsored content, it's listed as such.

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

#97

Post by IanCutress »

JJJollyjim wrote: post #85
bmenrigh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was under the impression it was going to be available to download without registration, but the CEO pinged me to say it will be registration required. They've debated internally and this is the direction they want to go down.

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

#100

Post by santaboom »

actionfromafar wrote: post #95
santaboom wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See amdahls law Edit: [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

Yes but we are also talking about energy efficiency

See figure 1 in [0] operation execution is just 0.1pj of 70pj required for a 32 bit int addition… how do you think I was applying amdahls law? Edit: I was using amdahls law as it applies to parallel processors. However in terms of energy usage …

See amdahls laws and use your imagination [0] https://semiengineering.com/more-data-drives-focus-on-ic-ene...

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