Re:Ambit: In-Memory Accelerator for Bulk Bitwise Operations ...
by gwern on Monday January 08, 2018 @12:16AM
(#16094806)
I don't think it's available out of the box. They say it would require just 1% additional circuitry and describe doing experiments on a circuit simulator (quoting from memory, PDF isn't loading at the moment), which doesn't sound like something available already on commodity RAM, quite.
Re:Ambit: In-Memory Accelerator for Bulk Bitwise Operations ...
by deepnotderp on Sunday January 07, 2018 @07:38PM
(#16093769)
Huh? If I'm not mistaken, Ambit is not a new development. I remember reading about it. (or at least some other commodity DRAM bitwise accelerator)
Re:Ambit: In-Memory Accelerator for Bulk Bitwise Operations ...
by puzzle on Monday January 08, 2018 @12:11AM
(#16094792)
Twenty years ago, Sun had special RAM in their Elite3D cards to do write-only alpha blending and z-buffering (saturated updates), instead of the much slower read-modify-write: one PCI write instead of one read + CPU computation + one write. That might have been UPA or even Sbus instead of PCI, but you get the idea. ATI and E&S later used it, too.
http://www.michaelfrankdeering.com/Projects/HardWare/p3DRAM/...
This looks like a variant of the Sun/Mitsubishi work, after a quick skim.
The fact that Intel + NVidia are present in the paper is very exciting too. Does this mean we could see the improvements with a simple software update?
This end of 2017 and start of 2018 is very weird. We got industry-wide performance degradation with meltdown, and now we are seeing industry-wide performance upgrade with another hardware trick!