4 ms·
Very interesting. At first, I thought this was pushing the processing closer to the data with some new special CPU logic inside the DRAM. I'm not sure, but it s
by BenoitP 9y ago
Very interesting. At first, I thought this was pushing the processing closer to the data with some new special CPU logic inside the DRAM. I'm not sure, but it seems to be available in out of the box current memory.
The fact that Intel + NVidia are present in the paper is very exciting too. Does this mean we could see the improvements with a simple software update?
This end of 2017 and start of 2018 is very weird. We got industry-wide performance degradation with meltdown, and now we are seeing industry-wide performance upgrade with another hardware trick!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deepnotderp 9y agoHuh? If I'm not mistaken, Ambit is not a new development. I remember reading about it. (or at least some other commodity DRAM bitwise accelerator)
- puzzle 9y agoTwenty years ago, Sun had special RAM in their Elite3D cards to do write-only alpha blending and z-buffering (saturated updates), instead of the much slower read-modify-write: one PCI write instead of one read + CPU computation + one write. That might have been UPA or even Sbus instead of PCI, but you get the idea. ATI and E&S later used it, too. http://www.michaelfrankdeering.com/Projects/HardWare/p3DRAM/p3DRAM.html http://www.michaelfrankdeering.com/Projects/HardWare/p3DRAM/... This looks like a variant of the Sun/Mitsubishi work, after a quick skim.
- gwern 9y agoI don't think it's available out of the box. They say it would require just 1% additional circuitry and describe doing experiments on a circuit simulator (quoting from memory, PDF isn't loading at the moment), which doesn't sound like something available already on commodity RAM, quite.