4 ms·

Micron had ram integrated state machine for some time now, nothing came out of that :( http://www.micronautomata.com/ http://www.micronautomata.com/ They migh

by rasz_pl 10y ago

Micron had ram integrated state machine for some time now, nothing came out of that :( http://www.micronautomata.com/ http://www.micronautomata.com/ They might be missing the boat by not releasing cheap entry level hardware platform, ~$20 ddr3/4 stick.

agumonkey 10y ago
Considering how often the RAM bottleneck was mentioned in computer performances talks I'm still surprised simple logic / arith instructions didn't hit mainstream RAM modules.
- lomnakkus 10y ago
  I'm obviously just speculating and handwaving wildly here[1], but ISTM that -- currently -- the limitation here lies mainly in programming languages and semantics. AFAICT all of the non-traditional machine models require radically different programming paradigms[2] and we still aren't quite at that point where gaining more performance is painful enough that the necessary research/innovation will happen. That's assuming that it's even possible. Obviously, any model of computation places some limitations on what can happen and all information transfer (thus computation) is still limited by the speed of light. Some things are just going to remain out of reach forever and not even Quantum Computers are going to help. [1] As I suppose we all are. C'mon we're talking about predicting the future here. [2] If you want a practical example, look at the PS/3 Cell processor. I can't claim to have done any 'native' programming for the PS/3, but I've heard (from very clever people that I trust) that it was quite alien and required radically different program structure from what one is used to. And that architecture isn't even that different from 'normal' architectures.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Naive thoughts, compilers could emit ram-local instructions instead of register spill and the likes. Maybe not fancy stuff but I thought there could be a nice class of block swap, or block (inc) that could be generated without too much burden in terms of semantics.
nabla9 10y ago
There was Intelligent RAM (IRAM) Project in berkeley 16 years ago. They had many interesting ideas that may be relevant tomorrow. http://iram.cs.berkeley.edu/ http://iram.cs.berkeley.edu/

by rasz_pl 10y ago

agumonkey 10y ago

Considering how often the RAM bottleneck was mentioned in computer performances talks I'm still surprised simple logic / arith instructions didn't hit mainstream RAM modules.

lomnakkus 10y ago
I'm obviously just speculating and handwaving wildly here[1], but ISTM that -- currently -- the limitation here lies mainly in programming languages and semantics. AFAICT all of the non-traditional machine models require radically different programming paradigms[2] and we still aren't quite at that point where gaining more performance is painful enough that the necessary research/innovation will happen. That's assuming that it's even possible. Obviously, any model of computation places some limitations on what can happen and all information transfer (thus computation) is still limited by the speed of light. Some things are just going to remain out of reach forever and not even Quantum Computers are going to help. [1] As I suppose we all are. C'mon we're talking about predicting the future here. [2] If you want a practical example, look at the PS/3 Cell processor. I can't claim to have done any 'native' programming for the PS/3, but I've heard (from very clever people that I trust) that it was quite alien and required radically different program structure from what one is used to. And that architecture isn't even that different from 'normal' architectures.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Naive thoughts, compilers could emit ram-local instructions instead of register spill and the likes. Maybe not fancy stuff but I thought there could be a nice class of block swap, or block (inc) that could be generated without too much burden in terms of semantics.

nabla9 10y ago

There was Intelligent RAM (IRAM) Project in berkeley 16 years ago. They had many interesting ideas that may be relevant tomorrow. http://iram.cs.berkeley.edu/ http://iram.cs.berkeley.edu/