A Tiny Chip That Could Disrupt Exascale Computing (2015)
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A Tiny Chip That Could Disrupt Exascale Computing (2015)
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Re: A Tiny Chip That Could Disrupt Exascale Computing (2015)
#2This is a 2015 story that I remember reading, then. Google news search shows only a couple articles this year about Rex Computing and only one tiny bit of news, that they're at tapeout. That's probably par for the course for a startup creating product (or prototype) one.
http://semiengineering.com/power-centric-chip-architectures/
also a speaking engagement: http://insidehpc.com/2016/01/call-for-papers-supercomputing-...
and a comment elsewhere that mentions another approach: the "Mill CPU of Mill Computing"
As I recollect (perhaps quite wrongly) Itanium (VLIW) failed because compiler-writers couldn't really be bothered or couldn't mount the learning curve. So I'm most curious about what progress is being made on the compiler side.
Re: A Tiny Chip That Could Disrupt Exascale Computing (2015)
#3This is a 2015 story that I remember reading, then. Google news search shows only a couple articles this year about Rex Computing and only one tiny bit of news, that they're at tapeout. That's probably par for the course for a startup creating product (or prototype) one. http://semiengineering.com/power-centric-chip-architectures/ also a speaking engagement: http://insidehpc.com/2016/01/call-for-papers-supercomputing…
Yeah, something like this is very much needed, but it's not the hard part. The software is the hard part. The software is the reason we have the multiple levels of cache we have now. Without solving the software challenges, there can be no challenger for the existing architectures.
It's interesting to note that convolutional neural nets (CNNs) are one solution to the software challenge. It's an imperfect solution, in the sense that CNNs are not as general purpose (at the same efficiency) and have strict data requirements for training, but it is a solution, and the big N are investing heavily to the point of designing ASICs.
Eventually, though, we need to solve the software problem. That will require rethinking programming languages.
Re: A Tiny Chip That Could Disrupt Exascale Computing (2015)
#4This is a 2015 story that I remember reading, then. Google news search shows only a couple articles this year about Rex Computing and only one tiny bit of news, that they're at tapeout. That's probably par for the course for a startup creating product (or prototype) one. http://semiengineering.com/power-centric-chip-architectures/ also a speaking engagement: http://insidehpc.com/2016/01/call-for-papers-supercomputing…
Yeah, something like this is very much needed, but it's not the hard part. The software is the hard part. The software is the reason we have the multiple levels of cache we have now. Without solving the software challenges, there can be no challenger for the existing architectures. It's interesting to note that convolutional neural nets (CNNs) are one solution to the software challenge. It's an imperfect solution, in…
True. I shoulda added "so to speak", since this is a still more extreme approach and might simply break any compiler/language combination we have, as you say.
Re: A Tiny Chip That Could Disrupt Exascale Computing (2015)
#5This is a 2015 story that I remember reading, then. Google news search shows only a couple articles this year about Rex Computing and only one tiny bit of news, that they're at tapeout. That's probably par for the course for a startup creating product (or prototype) one. http://semiengineering.com/power-centric-chip-architectures/ also a speaking engagement: http://insidehpc.com/2016/01/call-for-papers-supercomputing…
I recall an interview with someone formerly in upper management for the Itanium development project where he acknowledged that the most significant factor in the demise of Itanium was the exclusionary pricing structure Intel imposed on them.
Re: A Tiny Chip That Could Disrupt Exascale Computing (2015)
#6Founder of REX here, and surprised to see this posted here. Happy to answer any questions, and you can check my comment history for some of my prior posts on REX.
We've had some really great progress that we hope to share in the near future, so stay tuned.
EDIT: Since this article is over a year old, we have made a lot of progress, and have recently taped out our first chip. We haven't officially posted a job opening, but we are very shortly going to be looking for software engineers that would love to work on our architecture. Feel free to shoot me an email if you're interested!
Re: A Tiny Chip That Could Disrupt Exascale Computing (2015)
#7Founder of REX here, and surprised to see this posted here. Happy to answer any questions, and you can check my comment history for some of my prior posts on REX. We've had some really great progress that we hope to share in the near future, so stay tuned. EDIT: Since this article is over a year old, we have made a lot of progress, and have recently taped out our first chip. We haven't officially posted a job opening…
have you published any white papers detailing any of the following: architecture, instruction set, software availability, benchmarking / application porting and performance etc.
I read a couple of times that you got funding from various govt agencies. Most of these funding agencies publish rfp responses or slide decks unless you insisted on an NDA and was approved. I couldnt find any documents talking in depth about your work.
I am in the HPC space (academic, research) and am genuinely interested in learning more about your work.
Re: A Tiny Chip That Could Disrupt Exascale Computing (2015)
#8Founder of REX here, and surprised to see this posted here. Happy to answer any questions, and you can check my comment history for some of my prior posts on REX. We've had some really great progress that we hope to share in the near future, so stay tuned. EDIT: Since this article is over a year old, we have made a lot of progress, and have recently taped out our first chip. We haven't officially posted a job opening…
Is it possible to get a Developer Kit for it?
It would be great if there would be some raspberry pi like distribution with a Chip included. I think this could speed up the adoption.
Re: A Tiny Chip That Could Disrupt Exascale Computing (2015)
#9This is a 2015 story that I remember reading, then. Google news search shows only a couple articles this year about Rex Computing and only one tiny bit of news, that they're at tapeout. That's probably par for the course for a startup creating product (or prototype) one. http://semiengineering.com/power-centric-chip-architectures/ also a speaking engagement: http://insidehpc.com/2016/01/call-for-papers-supercomputing…
You are correct that we have already taped out, though we haven't made any announcements yet, though will be talking publicly about it in the future with a big focus on the "magic" on the software side.
You can read my comments on the Mill architecture elsewhere on HN (not a fan of stack machines), but my biggest disappointment in them is the fact that they have been working on Mill for ~10 years with a team ranging of 5 to 20 (from what I have heard) and have yet to get to silicon, while we have gone from a complete custom architectural idea to tapeout in ~11 months from closing our first seed funding.
The big technical failure point for Itanium (in my opinion) is the fact that Intel took the relatively pure VLIW research by Josh Fisher @ HP Labs and tried to add a ridiculous number of features (and attempted x86 compatibility) that impacted the ability to statically schedule instructions. The resulting bastard architecture Intel called "EPIC" (rather than VLIW) had a very difficult job in getting the compiler to generate instruction parallel code since Intel added a huge amount of indeterminism into the architecture that goes against the original VLIW tenets. If your compiler has to assume the worst case latency for all instructions and memory operations, you are going to have a bad time.
Re: A Tiny Chip That Could Disrupt Exascale Computing (2015)
#10Founder of REX here, and surprised to see this posted here. Happy to answer any questions, and you can check my comment history for some of my prior posts on REX. We've had some really great progress that we hope to share in the near future, so stay tuned. EDIT: Since this article is over a year old, we have made a lot of progress, and have recently taped out our first chip. We haven't officially posted a job opening…
Is it possible to get a Developer Kit for it? It would be great if there would be some raspberry pi like distribution with a Chip included. I think this could speed up the adoption.
We'll send an announcement on the mailing list when tools (software based and FPGA based simulation, along with actual silicon) will be available. We will only be getting 200 chips back from this initial test run, so we have to be fairly stringent in who will be getting hardware eval units in the coming months, but if you have a compelling application idea, feel free to send me an email (in my HN profile) and let me know.