6 ms·

> > The cost is further reduced by employing only static or dynamic ram as a means for holding the state of the system. [...] > Dynamic ram? Can I poke fun

by ohazi 5y ago

> > The cost is further reduced by employing only static or dynamic ram as a means for holding the state of the system. [...] > Dynamic ram? Can I poke fun at them for not knowing what RAM is? Yes I can. > The above paragraph succinctly describes malloc(), which is perhaps one of the most fundamental advancements in modern computing. The problem is that Al didn’t invent it. Memory management (the ability to take RAM and then give it back when your function is done) goes back to the dawn of computing. No, this is wrong. Nathan is referring to dynamic memory allocation, which is what malloc does, but that isn't what this line in the lawsuit is talking about. Dynamic RAM, or DRAM is RAM that stores state in a capacitor. This is what your laptop uses -- DDR4 SDRAM is "Double data rate (version 4) synchronous dynamic RAM". In DRAM, the charge on the capacitors slowly dissipates, so DRAM needs to be "refreshed" periodically, which is why it's referred to a "dynamic" RAM. Static RAM, or SRAM, is RAM that stores state in a register-like structure (usually cross-coupled inverters). It's "static" in that it doesn't need to be refreshed -- as long as the supply voltage is maintained, the bits stored in an SRAM will remain intact. I agree that this patent lawsuit is bullshit, and I really hate to derail the conversation, but I'm surprised by Nathan's misunderstanding here, given that SparkFun makes embedded boards that use all kinds of memory. SRAM/DRAM isn't unusual terminology. The distinction doesn't even matter in the context of this line in the lawsuit, but if you're going to make a point of nitpicking about something, you should really make sure that you're actually right about it first...

sharemywin 5y ago
I remember when I toured a research nuclear reactor and I was talking with the nuclear phd student and I said something about an alpha particle and the protons and neutrons. And they were trying to say alpha particles aren't made up of protons and neutrons. Made me realize than that even an expert in the field might not know something that I would have thought was common knowledge.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  There are some pretty obvious followup questions: - What are alpha particles made of? - When an element undergoes alpha decay, its atomic number is reduced by two. Where do the protons go?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - cjtrowbridge 5y ago
    An alpha particle is a particle produced during alpha decay. It's always just a helium-4 which is made of two protons and two neutrons but with no electrons. This is why we have to mine for helium because it is produced in the ground by alpha decay. It's different from normal helium because it doesn't have any electrons and it has an empty orbital which means it really really would like to have some electrons and also it's going crazy fast when it is created so that's why it's dangerous. But then once it takes those electrons from somewhere it becomes normal helium. You just don't want that happening in your body. It seems like the other commenters in this thread are alluding to the electron thing maybe? Not exactly sure what point they're making.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      I believe that is clear, those questions were intended to be read as ones to put to the nuclear engineer who claimed an alpha particle was not made of two nuetrons and two protons.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      As far as I understand, the claim is actually that an Alpha particle is made up of quarks and gluons, the same number you would find in 2 protons and 2 neutrons, but that the proton and neutron are different things. It sounds like there's a very technical distinction about exactly how you define a particle. Essentially, I believe that the claim is something like saying that modeling an alpha particle as 2 neutrons and 2 protons loses some information that you would have if you model it as 12 quarks, because the 12 quarks interact in (slightly) different ways than a proton and a neutron would.
      - jhgb 5y ago
        But that sounds like a difference between two models, not a difference between two physical objects. To me it seems that if you were to follow this line of thinking religiously, you could then never say things like "an atom of carbon has six protons", since, well, they're not quite protons according to this logic.
- dekhn 5y ago
  Right. I was pretty surprised and amused when I was learning nuclear chemistry and realized: an alpha particle is also a helium-4 nuclei, a beta particle is an electron/positron, and a gamma ray is just high energy electromagnetic radiation. This is sort of because the discoveries were made before people were really aware of helium nuclei, electrons/positrons, or high energy EM, they just ran physical experiments in a lab and saw there were different kinds of radiation that had different physical properties, and under close inspection of those properties, the nature of the radiation was deduced.
- dylan604 5y ago
  It's not uncommon for someone to be so focused on their specific area of a field that they loose sight of the rest of the areas.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  They may have been so into their own bellybutton lint that they were very concerned about the difference between bound quarks on a QCD lattice compared to just elmer's gluing 2 free neutrons and 2 free protons together or something like that.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Yes, I have heard a lot of times how atom nuclei and alpha particles aren't made of protons and neutrons. It's always on this sense. Some times the difference is relevant (and people dealing with radioactivity see those times more often than others), but some people insist on the pedantic distinction even when it isn't.
    - adrian_b 5y ago
      The binding energy of protons & neutrons into nuclei is less than 1% of their mass, so the energy required to separate a nucleus, like an alpha particle, into all its constituent protons and neutrons, is negligible in comparison with the energies required for interactions so intense that they would generate any other hadrons except protons and neutrons, for example pi mesons, which would expose the inner structure of protons and neutrons. This is an important feature of nature, whose consequence is that the most convenient way of understanding the world is that the first approximation, which is useful for almost all practical purposes, is to consider everything as composed of protons, neutrons and electrons, which are bound by strong, electromagnetic and gravitational forces and that there are also positrons (antielectrons), which can be generated in sufficiently intense interactions and which will annihilate with electrons. Only for few purposes it is necessary to go beyond this and take into account that there are many other hadrons composed of quarks, besides protons and neutrons, and that there are also other leptons. The distinction between these 2 level of approximation is important and whoever likes to think that alpha particles as not being made of protons of neutrons fails to get it. Of course, for many purposes you can ignore the strong nuclear forces and you can consider the surrounding world as being made of electrons and of a little less than 300 kinds of long lived nuclei, which are bound by electromagnetic and gravitational forces. At this other level of approximation, you should ignore the proton-neutron composition of any nucleus, but when you talk about alpha particles, you normally mean helium nuclei having a kinetic energy high enough to not be negligible in comparison with the binding energies of nuclei, so you are not in a situation when you can ignore the nuclear compositions. In any physical model, it is important to specify clearly which is the level of approximation at which it works. Mixing randomly various levels of approximation of the structure of things is usually a bad strategy.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I would think that not thinking alpha particle as "made up" from protons and neutrons helpful abstraction in thinking about fission. Yes, they are, but we can't really form them or deform them at will. Specially when you already deal with free neutrons.
rrss 5y ago
pretty sure the author is describing how the "runtime reconfiguration" described in the next two sentences of the lawsuit after the one you quoted is a memory allocator, not confused and thinking "dynamic RAM" means "dynamically allocated memory"
- ohazi 5y ago
  This line appears to suggest otherwise. > Dynamic ram? Can I poke fun at them for not knowing what RAM is? Yes I can. He's trying to nitpick about the term "dynamic" in this context, which he has misunderstood to mean "dynamic allocation" (i.e. the alternative to "static allocation"). The phrase "static or dynamic RAM" is basically never used to refer to memory allocation, it refers to the physical construction of the memory. This is especially true if the paragraph is next to a block diagram that includes an ALU... They are five levels removed from any sort of allocator. The rest of the paragraph doesn't describe a memory allocator, it's describing runtime reconfiguration of a circuit, which you can do (and often do do) using a statically allocated configuration block or even a hard-wired dedicated memory. Again, nothing to do with malloc. Whether a configuration memory is SRAM or DRAM based is immaterial, but patent language likes to make a point of enumerating the possibilities.
  - rrss 5y ago
    I read that line as poking fun of the fact that RAM is not capitalized because the lawyers that wrote this think "ram" is a word, not an acronym
    - ohazi 5y ago
      Eh, shrug. I don't think so. In any case, the fact that SparkFun doesn't even do semiconductor design makes this whole lawsuit even more ridiculous. They put chips onto boards, they don't design ALUs with special configurable control bits!
      - URSpider94 5y ago
        It actually doesn't matter if SparkFun designs chips. They do buy them, and re-sell them in devices. Patent law continues to apply to all downstream implementations of a product, until the claim is "exhausted" by a license. So, if the maker of the SoC doesn't have a license from this troll, then the troll is free to sue all of their customers, and in turn their customers, all the way down until someone pays up. It's a bit absurd to imagine, but if someone has a patent on a CPU design, which is then used in a radio, which is installed in a car, which is driven by a taxi driver, then the patent holder can in principle sue the taxi driver for using their radio without licensing the patent. In practice, patent trolls will figure out who they can sue who is big enough to extract $$, but not so big as to run the risk of them fighting back and invalidating the patent.
cecilpl2 5y ago
You are mistaken. The lawsuit itself is clearly referring to dynamic memory allocation. It refers to "static or dynamic ram" to mean RAM in general, but the paragraph has nothing to do with the characteristics of SRAM vs DRAM. From page 6 of the lawsuit [0]: > in fixed function implementations all possible functional requirements of the necessary data processing must be implemented on the silicon regardless of the final application of the device or the nature of the data to be processed. > Therefore, if a fixed function device must adaptively process data, then it must commit silicon resources to process all possible flavors of the data. > The inventors therefore sought to provide a new apparatus for implementing systems on a chip that will enable the user to achieve performance of fixed-function implementation at a lower cost. > The lower cost is achieved by removing redundancy from the system. The redundancy is removed by re-using groups of computational and storage elements in different configurations. > The cost is further reduced by employing only static or dynamic ram as a means for holding the state of the system. > All of this reconfiguration can take place dynamically in run-time without any degradation of performance over fixed-function implementations. > The present invention is therefore an apparatus for adaptively dynamically reconfiguring groups of computations and storage elements in run-time to process multiple separate streams of data and control at varying rates. As you can see, it's saying that rather than pinning RAM (as previous fixed-function approaches did in the 80s), this system allows you to request memory dynamically. I mean, it's a garbage patent anyway and not really worth so much time trying to analyze what they are claiming, but Nathan isn't wrong - the patent really isn't referring to SRAM and DRAM. [0] https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/home_page_posts/3/9/1/7/Altair_v._Sparkfun_Complaint.pdf https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/home_page_posts/3/9/1/7/Alta...
- ohazi 5y ago
  The lawsuit is decidedly not referring to dynamic memory allocation. There's no way to "request" a runtime-specified amount of memory dynamically here. The memory in question is a tiny, fixed-size block of RAM inside the chip that's directly connected to the various logic blocks. There is no way to allocate or request anything -- that memory is all you've got, and all of the bits have been spoken for by the time the chip is taped out. What they seem to be describing is something resembling a C union mapped directly onto that RAM block. That's not dynamic allocation, that's "these bits are interpreted differently depending on which logic blocks are active, so that we don't have to have a separate RAM block for each functional unit, because that would be a waste of space." Every legal combination and order of configuration structures in this RAM block is specified and tested, that's why it's not dynamic allocation. If anything, it's a really big list of possible static allocations. I agree with you that the SRAM/DRAM distinction is immaterial, but that's just how patents are written. But of course, all this is a complete tangent. Nothing that SparkFun makes has anything to do with any of this.

by ohazi 5y ago

sharemywin 5y ago

I remember when I toured a research nuclear reactor and I was talking with the nuclear phd student and I said something about an alpha particle and the protons and neutrons. And they were trying to say alpha particles aren't made up of protons and neutrons. Made me realize than that even an expert in the field might not know something that I would have thought was common knowledge.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
There are some pretty obvious followup questions: - What are alpha particles made of? - When an element undergoes alpha decay, its atomic number is reduced by two. Where do the protons go?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cjtrowbridge 5y ago
  An alpha particle is a particle produced during alpha decay. It's always just a helium-4 which is made of two protons and two neutrons but with no electrons. This is why we have to mine for helium because it is produced in the ground by alpha decay. It's different from normal helium because it doesn't have any electrons and it has an empty orbital which means it really really would like to have some electrons and also it's going crazy fast when it is created so that's why it's dangerous. But then once it takes those electrons from somewhere it becomes normal helium. You just don't want that happening in your body. It seems like the other commenters in this thread are alluding to the electron thing maybe? Not exactly sure what point they're making.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    I believe that is clear, those questions were intended to be read as ones to put to the nuclear engineer who claimed an alpha particle was not made of two nuetrons and two protons.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    As far as I understand, the claim is actually that an Alpha particle is made up of quarks and gluons, the same number you would find in 2 protons and 2 neutrons, but that the proton and neutron are different things. It sounds like there's a very technical distinction about exactly how you define a particle. Essentially, I believe that the claim is something like saying that modeling an alpha particle as 2 neutrons and 2 protons loses some information that you would have if you model it as 12 quarks, because the 12 quarks interact in (slightly) different ways than a proton and a neutron would.
    - jhgb 5y ago
      But that sounds like a difference between two models, not a difference between two physical objects. To me it seems that if you were to follow this line of thinking religiously, you could then never say things like "an atom of carbon has six protons", since, well, they're not quite protons according to this logic.
dekhn 5y ago
Right. I was pretty surprised and amused when I was learning nuclear chemistry and realized: an alpha particle is also a helium-4 nuclei, a beta particle is an electron/positron, and a gamma ray is just high energy electromagnetic radiation. This is sort of because the discoveries were made before people were really aware of helium nuclei, electrons/positrons, or high energy EM, they just ran physical experiments in a lab and saw there were different kinds of radiation that had different physical properties, and under close inspection of those properties, the nature of the radiation was deduced.
dylan604 5y ago
It's not uncommon for someone to be so focused on their specific area of a field that they loose sight of the rest of the areas.
lamontcg 5y ago
They may have been so into their own bellybutton lint that they were very concerned about the difference between bound quarks on a QCD lattice compared to just elmer's gluing 2 free neutrons and 2 free protons together or something like that.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Yes, I have heard a lot of times how atom nuclei and alpha particles aren't made of protons and neutrons. It's always on this sense. Some times the difference is relevant (and people dealing with radioactivity see those times more often than others), but some people insist on the pedantic distinction even when it isn't.
  - adrian_b 5y ago
    The binding energy of protons & neutrons into nuclei is less than 1% of their mass, so the energy required to separate a nucleus, like an alpha particle, into all its constituent protons and neutrons, is negligible in comparison with the energies required for interactions so intense that they would generate any other hadrons except protons and neutrons, for example pi mesons, which would expose the inner structure of protons and neutrons. This is an important feature of nature, whose consequence is that the most convenient way of understanding the world is that the first approximation, which is useful for almost all practical purposes, is to consider everything as composed of protons, neutrons and electrons, which are bound by strong, electromagnetic and gravitational forces and that there are also positrons (antielectrons), which can be generated in sufficiently intense interactions and which will annihilate with electrons. Only for few purposes it is necessary to go beyond this and take into account that there are many other hadrons composed of quarks, besides protons and neutrons, and that there are also other leptons. The distinction between these 2 level of approximation is important and whoever likes to think that alpha particles as not being made of protons of neutrons fails to get it. Of course, for many purposes you can ignore the strong nuclear forces and you can consider the surrounding world as being made of electrons and of a little less than 300 kinds of long lived nuclei, which are bound by electromagnetic and gravitational forces. At this other level of approximation, you should ignore the proton-neutron composition of any nucleus, but when you talk about alpha particles, you normally mean helium nuclei having a kinetic energy high enough to not be negligible in comparison with the binding energies of nuclei, so you are not in a situation when you can ignore the nuclear compositions. In any physical model, it is important to specify clearly which is the level of approximation at which it works. Mixing randomly various levels of approximation of the structure of things is usually a bad strategy.
Ekaros 5y ago
I would think that not thinking alpha particle as "made up" from protons and neutrons helpful abstraction in thinking about fission. Yes, they are, but we can't really form them or deform them at will. Specially when you already deal with free neutrons.

rrss 5y ago

pretty sure the author is describing how the "runtime reconfiguration" described in the next two sentences of the lawsuit after the one you quoted is a memory allocator, not confused and thinking "dynamic RAM" means "dynamically allocated memory"

ohazi 5y ago
This line appears to suggest otherwise. > Dynamic ram? Can I poke fun at them for not knowing what RAM is? Yes I can. He's trying to nitpick about the term "dynamic" in this context, which he has misunderstood to mean "dynamic allocation" (i.e. the alternative to "static allocation"). The phrase "static or dynamic RAM" is basically never used to refer to memory allocation, it refers to the physical construction of the memory. This is especially true if the paragraph is next to a block diagram that includes an ALU... They are five levels removed from any sort of allocator. The rest of the paragraph doesn't describe a memory allocator, it's describing runtime reconfiguration of a circuit, which you can do (and often do do) using a statically allocated configuration block or even a hard-wired dedicated memory. Again, nothing to do with malloc. Whether a configuration memory is SRAM or DRAM based is immaterial, but patent language likes to make a point of enumerating the possibilities.
- rrss 5y ago
  I read that line as poking fun of the fact that RAM is not capitalized because the lawyers that wrote this think "ram" is a word, not an acronym
  - ohazi 5y ago
    Eh, shrug. I don't think so. In any case, the fact that SparkFun doesn't even do semiconductor design makes this whole lawsuit even more ridiculous. They put chips onto boards, they don't design ALUs with special configurable control bits!
    - URSpider94 5y ago
      It actually doesn't matter if SparkFun designs chips. They do buy them, and re-sell them in devices. Patent law continues to apply to all downstream implementations of a product, until the claim is "exhausted" by a license. So, if the maker of the SoC doesn't have a license from this troll, then the troll is free to sue all of their customers, and in turn their customers, all the way down until someone pays up. It's a bit absurd to imagine, but if someone has a patent on a CPU design, which is then used in a radio, which is installed in a car, which is driven by a taxi driver, then the patent holder can in principle sue the taxi driver for using their radio without licensing the patent. In practice, patent trolls will figure out who they can sue who is big enough to extract $$, but not so big as to run the risk of them fighting back and invalidating the patent.

cecilpl2 5y ago

You are mistaken. The lawsuit itself is clearly referring to dynamic memory allocation. It refers to "static or dynamic ram" to mean RAM in general, but the paragraph has nothing to do with the characteristics of SRAM vs DRAM. From page 6 of the lawsuit [0]: > in fixed function implementations all possible functional requirements of the necessary data processing must be implemented on the silicon regardless of the final application of the device or the nature of the data to be processed. > Therefore, if a fixed function device must adaptively process data, then it must commit silicon resources to process all possible flavors of the data. > The inventors therefore sought to provide a new apparatus for implementing systems on a chip that will enable the user to achieve performance of fixed-function implementation at a lower cost. > The lower cost is achieved by removing redundancy from the system. The redundancy is removed by re-using groups of computational and storage elements in different configurations. > The cost is further reduced by employing only static or dynamic ram as a means for holding the state of the system. > All of this reconfiguration can take place dynamically in run-time without any degradation of performance over fixed-function implementations. > The present invention is therefore an apparatus for adaptively dynamically reconfiguring groups of computations and storage elements in run-time to process multiple separate streams of data and control at varying rates. As you can see, it's saying that rather than pinning RAM (as previous fixed-function approaches did in the 80s), this system allows you to request memory dynamically. I mean, it's a garbage patent anyway and not really worth so much time trying to analyze what they are claiming, but Nathan isn't wrong - the patent really isn't referring to SRAM and DRAM. [0] https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/home_page_posts/3/9/1/7/Altair_v._Sparkfun_Complaint.pdf https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/home_page_posts/3/9/1/7/Alta...

ohazi 5y ago
The lawsuit is decidedly not referring to dynamic memory allocation. There's no way to "request" a runtime-specified amount of memory dynamically here. The memory in question is a tiny, fixed-size block of RAM inside the chip that's directly connected to the various logic blocks. There is no way to allocate or request anything -- that memory is all you've got, and all of the bits have been spoken for by the time the chip is taped out. What they seem to be describing is something resembling a C union mapped directly onto that RAM block. That's not dynamic allocation, that's "these bits are interpreted differently depending on which logic blocks are active, so that we don't have to have a separate RAM block for each functional unit, because that would be a waste of space." Every legal combination and order of configuration structures in this RAM block is specified and tested, that's why it's not dynamic allocation. If anything, it's a really big list of possible static allocations. I agree with you that the SRAM/DRAM distinction is immaterial, but that's just how patents are written. But of course, all this is a complete tangent. Nothing that SparkFun makes has anything to do with any of this.