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Whilst it would be nice, we would be adding a lot more heat into the CPU block. Maybe they could and add extra cooling on the other side, though would really be

by Zenst 5y ago

Whilst it would be nice, we would be adding a lot more heat into the CPU block. Maybe they could and add extra cooling on the other side, though would really be looking at reinventing the CPU socket and thoughts of Intel Slot-1 form factor start to become appealing again as a form factor to allow such cooling solutions. Now what we have over the years seen interest in is adding processing cores to the RAM itself and maybe having a small dedicated processor for some tasks attached to the RAM may well prove viable. Imagine if we didn't have any CPU or RAM sockets/slots and just a row of slots you addedd a module that had CPU/RAM in one and can just add more upto the slot limit. But then, that is kinda how GPU's have gone already in many aspects and look at how much RAM they hold and how large the cooling solution for them is. That gives you an idea of the cooling needed for large amounts of processing and RAM when closely packaged.

linuxftw 5y ago
> Now what we have over the years seen interest in is adding processing cores to the RAM itself and maybe having a small dedicated processor for some tasks attached to the RAM may well prove viable. I think we call these 'GPUs' today. > just a row of slots you addedd a module that had CPU/RAM As you mentioned, GPUs fit this description, but some PCIe devices are full-blown embedded systems. I think we're at the point where the only major improvements will take place on the CPU die itself.
- derefr 5y ago
  GPUs aren't quite the same, because they're (mostly) SIMD. GPUs don't have the independent per-compute-core memory bandwidth required for every core to be running its own execution thread with an independent instruction pointer, independent data fetches, and (especially) non-correlated branch-prediction failures / cache misses. (This is most of the reason that branching, if even implemented in the GPU's ISA, is effectively useless.) Whereas, what the parent poster is describing would be true MIMD: a bunch of tiny cores each with its own on-board RAM, its own instruction pointer, and then a bus (or a bunch of busses) fast enough to feed them all data from (probably NUMA) main memory. GPUs don't provide any advantage for running e.g. a high-concurrency Erlang application server. But a true-MIMD system would.

by Zenst 5y ago

linuxftw 5y ago

> Now what we have over the years seen interest in is adding processing cores to the RAM itself and maybe having a small dedicated processor for some tasks attached to the RAM may well prove viable. I think we call these 'GPUs' today. > just a row of slots you addedd a module that had CPU/RAM As you mentioned, GPUs fit this description, but some PCIe devices are full-blown embedded systems. I think we're at the point where the only major improvements will take place on the CPU die itself.

derefr 5y ago
GPUs aren't quite the same, because they're (mostly) SIMD. GPUs don't have the independent per-compute-core memory bandwidth required for every core to be running its own execution thread with an independent instruction pointer, independent data fetches, and (especially) non-correlated branch-prediction failures / cache misses. (This is most of the reason that branching, if even implemented in the GPU's ISA, is effectively useless.) Whereas, what the parent poster is describing would be true MIMD: a bunch of tiny cores each with its own on-board RAM, its own instruction pointer, and then a bus (or a bunch of busses) fast enough to feed them all data from (probably NUMA) main memory. GPUs don't provide any advantage for running e.g. a high-concurrency Erlang application server. But a true-MIMD system would.