Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "As Nicole Hemsoth over at HPCwire reports 'In a nutshell, the Automata processor is a programmable silicon device that lends itself to handing high speed search and analysis across massive, complex, unstructured data. As an alternate processing engine for targeted areas, it taps into the inner parallelism inherent to memory to provide a robust and absolutely remarkable, if early benchmarks are to be believed, option for certain types of processing.'" Basically, the chip is designed solely to process Nondeterministic Finite Automata and can explore all valid paths of an NFA in parallel, hiding the whole O(n^2) complexity thing. Micron has a stash of technical documents including a paper covering the design and development of the chip. Imagine how fast you can process regexes now.

An anonymous reader writes "As Nicole Hemsoth over at HPCwire reports 'In a nutshell, the Automata processor is a programmable silicon device that lends itself to handing high speed search and analysis across massive, complex, unstructured data. As an alternate processing engine for targeted areas, it taps into the inner parallelism inherent to memory to provide a robust and absolutely remarkable, if early benchmarks are to be believed, option for certain types of processing.'" Basically, the chip is designed solely to process Nondeterministic Finite Automata and can explore all valid paths of an NFA in parallel, hiding the whole O(n^2) complexity thing. Micron has a stash of technical documents including a paper covering the design and development of the chip. Imagine how fast you can process regexes now.

darkrot writes "According to the Micron website, Micron is suing Rambus for violations of antitrust laws, as well as asserting its non-infringement and the invalidity of Rambus' patents." So far Hitachi and Toshiba have settled with Rambus. Toshiba still makes RAMs, so its settlement with Rambus was odd in that it could only spur on Rambus to sue more people. This suit might reduce the attraction of business models based on generating patents and suing, rather than bringing products to market. Update: 08/29 07:03 PM by S :Oops: "settled with Rambus" not Micron.