4 ms·
Wow, you sent me down a serious rabbit hole. That core looks awesome, and the ring bus blew my mind [1]. What is the practical difference between a very wide S
by Brusco_RF 3y ago
Wow, you sent me down a serious rabbit hole. That core looks awesome, and the ring bus blew my mind [1].
What is the practical difference between a very wide SIMD processor vs very many single-instruction processors? Is there any? They say this processor is comprised of 16 "slices", each 265B SIMD + 1 MiB cache. Is that different at all from having 16 265B processors?
[1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/centaur/microarchitectures/cha#Ring https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/centaur/microarchitectures/cha#...
- Dylan16807 3y agoThey all run the same instruction, so I'm not actually sure if the slices matter much.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoA huge SIMD core should have a die area advantage (which in turn gives it other advantages) over a bunch of little processors of the same "width" executing instructions independently. And there is less overhead. In exchange, it can't process different instruction streams simultaneously. It has to perform the same operations over a giant chunk data, or otherwise "waste" the huge SIMD width. Another highlight of this thing: > There is also extensive support for predication with 8 predication registers. The unit is optimized for 8-bit integers (9-bit calculations) From everything I read, NCore would have been a low price LLM monster. Centaur would probably be alive and selling them like hotcakes if they came out with it now, instead if then.
- Brusco_RF 3y agoWould have? What do you mean?
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThis SoC was, unfortunately, never really used, Centaur shut down and IIRC Intel bought the remains. Which is a shame, as it was really cool. And it was x86!