http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/137085-adapteva-turns-to-kickstarter-to-fund-massively-parallel-processor
... > The reason for this is pretty simple. The Epiphany IV architecture, like a > number of many-core architectures, dumps most of the features that CPUs (both > RISC and CISC) have relied on to boost performance over the past thirty years. Well, duh, if you've fallen into a deep well you need to trim the fat in order to get out again. Digging yourself further in definitely doesn't help. > There are no caches; each core is assigned its own slice of RAM. Which is a very good thing, as putting core next to the CPU is the only way to boost throughput, and cache makes on-die SRAM (or MRAM) actually slower as well as burns juice, gates and dilutes silicon real estate. Can you tell I like this thing? > Cores can access data held by other cores The designer was a nice guy, he emulated global memory with message passing. A tradeoff made to coddle the weak. > but the latency impact will inevitably be considerable. Obey the speed of light limit, since it's the law. > The specs above imply that each Parallela platform will have between 16-64MB > of RAM depending on the final number of processors. Dunno, I can work with that. > The reason Intel, AMD, and Nvidia haven’t gone down this road is because the > final product is extremely specialized. No, they know that the computer industry has painted itself into a corner, and the result wouldn't sell. Actually Adapteva catering to the small tinkerer and educational sector for bootstrap was probably the best move they could do. > Adapteva has created an FPU co-processor that’s extremely good at a very > narrow set of tasks. That would seem in the eye of the observer. I would say it maps to the vast majority of the tasks, if you know how. > Unfortunately, this is completely out of step with the general goals of the > computing industry. The worse for the computing industry, then. > Over the past thirty years, controllers and co-processors that once required > their own expansion cards or motherboard sockets have steadily moved away > from separate hardware implementations and towards integration — first on the > motherboard, and now on the processor. It's a cluster on a chip, fer chrissakes. If that's not integration, I don't know what integration is. I hope Adapteva makes it to kilocore and 3D mesh, that would be very useful thing in the right price and power bracket. I might be not able to afford a BlueGene, but I can probably afford this. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
