Re:Chip Industry's Fundamental Shifts in 2018
by PhantomGremlin on Saturday December 22, 2018 @07:04PM
(#18743321)
what would these alternative architectures be?
A traditional von Newmann computer reads instructions and data from memory, into something that does arithmetic, logic and control (call it a CPU).
But consider that the "memory" nowadays is composed of multiple instances of 8 Gib DRAM. That's a lot of bits to be sitting there, read out perhaps 64 at a time by the CPU.
Instead, can some logic be embedded within each memory chip? Some way to bypass the "von Neumann bottleneck"?[1]
Ideas like that are the essence of "alternative architecture". Can a system composed of these, let's call them "non-von Neumann" elements, be faster or cheaper than the computer architecture we've been using since Johnny's 1945 seminal paper.[2]
A traditional von Newmann computer reads instructions and data from memory, into something that does arithmetic, logic and control (call it a CPU).
But consider that the "memory" nowadays is composed of multiple instances of 8 Gib DRAM. That's a lot of bits to be sitting there, read out perhaps 64 at a time by the CPU.
Instead, can some logic be embedded within each memory chip? Some way to bypass the "von Neumann bottleneck"?[1]
Ideas like that are the essence of "alternative architecture". Can a system composed of these, let's call them "non-von Neumann" elements, be faster or cheaper than the computer architecture we've been using since Johnny's 1945 seminal paper.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#Von_N...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the...