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The headline is misleading; the article isn't really about whether or not low-level optimisations matter. With that being said, the idea that one of the big spe
by TchoBeer 5y ago
The headline is misleading; the article isn't really about whether or not low-level optimisations matter. With that being said, the idea that one of the big speedups that computers have gotten in the past two decades is better caching and branch prediction is interesting, and the idea that we use neural nets for it is known to me but still really cool.
- atq2119 5y agoMy understanding is that the use of neural nets in branch prediction is greatly overstated for marketing purposes. It's really more that different branch predictors are combined into a single one using a simple function (read: linear combination) that is "learned" (read: coefficients are updated sightly whenever the branch is encountered, based on the predicted vs actual branch direction).
- dragontamer 5y agoAMD Zen 1 had a neural net branch predictor for real. But Zen2 / Zen3 don't seem to have this idea referenced anywhere. I can only imagine that AMD managed to beat their neural-net branch predictor with some boring methodology. EDIT: https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/2458/a-look-at-the-amd-zen-2-core/ https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/2458/a-look-at-the-amd-zen-2-... Wikichip has done an article on it.
- ncmncm 5y agoThey all (still) have it, but it is no longer worth mentioning. Zen 2 has another scheme running at the same time, and they compete. Zen 3 must have refinements, and more bits thrown at it.
- ncmncm 5y agoNeural nets are themselves greatly overstated for marketing purposes. Any time you have an array of coefficients that are adjusted according to input history and combined for a result, you might as well call it that.