Re:Fifty or Sixty Years of Processor Development for This?
by michrassena on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @02:18PM
(#16757417)
As a matter of fact, I think this concept dates at least as far back as the IBM 360.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_I/O
And you can find similar concepts in a standard PC today. The GPU is an example of offloading a workload to a specialized processor.
Re:Fifty or Sixty Years of Processor Development for This?
by bshanks on Sunday April 15, 2018 @03:49PM
(#16844546)
In addition, if each individual unit of memory hardware gained mini-CPU-like data processing capability, then you would have additional faux-CPU power that scaled linearly with memory; this would allow you to do some (embarassingly parallel) things much faster than just having one additional CPU per peripheral.
Re:Fifty or Sixty Years of Processor Development for This?
by jacquesm on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @01:57PM
(#16757217)
Every modern hard drive is a computer in its own right.
Re:Fifty or Sixty Years of Processor Development for This?
by sliken on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @10:25PM
(#16761286)
Seagate had a cool project where each hard drive ran linux and they used the physical sas cable to run a 2.5 Gbit network (or two actually) per drive.
So you could use that as block storage for luster, hadoop, or similar and enable things like direct disk to disk copies.
Cool idea, seems unlikely to hit a reasonable price point though.
From what I remember, the IBM System Z mainframes also do this sort of thing and have dedicated IO processors that can decode XML on the fly for you and other fun things like that.