Startup Combines CPU and DRAM 211
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the two-in-one dept.
from the two-in-one dept.
MojoKid writes "CPU design firm Venray Technology announced a new product design this week that it claims can deliver enormous performance benefits by combining CPU and DRAM on to a single piece of silicon. Venray's TOMI (Thread Optimized Multiprocessor) attempts to redefine the problem by building a very different type of microprocessor. The TOMI Borealis is built using the same transistor structures as conventional DRAM; the chip trades clock speed and performance for ultra-low low leakage. Its design is, by necessity, extremely simple. Not counting the cache, TOMI is a 22,000 transistor design. Instead of surrounding a CPU core with L2 and L3 cache, Venray inserted a CPU core directly into a DRAM design. A TOMI Borealis core connects eight TOMI cores to a 1Gbit DRAM with a total of 16 ICs per 2GB DIMM. This works out to a total of 128 processor cores per DIMM. That said, when your CPU has fewer transistors than an architecture that debuted in 1986, there is a good chance that you left a few things out--like an FPU, branch prediction, pipelining, or any form of speculative execution. Venray may have created a chip with power consumption an order of magnitude lower than anything ARM builds and more memory bandwidth than Intel's highest-end Xeons, but it's an ultra-specialized, ultra-lightweight core that trades 25 years of flexibility and performance for scads of memory bandwidth."
but... (Score:5, Funny)
does it run GNU/Linux?
Fantastic (Score:1, Funny)
I'd love to see a beowulf cluster of these things...
Oh, wait..
Re:but... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So, is it a CAM or a DRPU? (Score:4, Funny)
Missed a D - better make that DUM-CRAP*.
I wonder, how much DUM-CRAP could we fit into a single PC?
* this name is by no means a reflection on what I think of the tech - it sounds like a pretty cool idea.
Yo dawg! (Score:2, Funny)
I heard you like to reduce maps, so I put a CPU in your RAM so you can hash while you map.
Re:Map Reduce? (Score:5, Funny)
Why in the world is people always saying the word Map Reduce nowerdays, I hear it every week atleast. Like it would be the solution to world war 3.
Since WWIII hasn't happened yet, you cannot rule out the fact that it *might* be the solution.
Re:Don't count this out yet (Score:5, Funny)
Signed, old assembly language programmer guy
I see what you did there.
Re:Don't count this out yet (Score:5, Funny)
That's a bit shifty, don't you think? I don't mean to negate your point, but too, it's beyond my power to complement you -- I'm somewhat over a barrel. Perhaps if you add one to your argument, we'd have something else. Logically speaking. HCF.