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Clearspeed Makes Tall Claims for Future Chip

Posted by michael on from the pound-of-salt dept.

Josuah writes "ClearSpeed Technology announced today a new multithreaded array processor named the CS301. Their press release states the chip can achieve 25Gflops for only 3W of power. New Scientist and TechNewsWorld have articles on this chip, each with more information about the chip. I wondering if this is too good to be true." The key phrase is in the Wired story: "Soon to be in prototype, the chip...". "Soon to be in prototype" is synonymous with "does not exist".

1 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Maspar by hobit · · Score: 4, Interesting
    For the last 10 years or so I've been thinking about how to do just this. What I'm 99% sure they are doing is SIMD on a massive scale. The Maspar (and especially the Maspar-2) were computers along this line.

    The basic idea is to have lots of "processing elements" that are basically ALUs with a bit of additional smarts (for branches mainly). Each PE has its own memory. The main processor (probably not the PC CPU) tells each PE what to do. Thus the Single Instruction Multiple Data. Things are a bit more complex then this (branches, pointers, and a few other things cause some problems.) but not too much worse. PE to PE communication is also interesting (the Maspar was a toroid as I recall).

    The two basic problems with this type of a design are:

    • You either need a special programming language (and someone who understands the language and understands the problem really well) or a very very good compiler to get anything out of it.
    • The application range is quite limited. Not as limited as supercomputer people seem to think (I mean I've written genetic algorithm code for the Maspar that scales wonderfully.) but still quite limited.

    There are also a huge number of other problems. Caches don't generally do a darn thing for massive SIMD computers (if one processing element misses, they all do.) The memory usually has two types of pointers (one to the PE memory and one to global memory). I may contact the company to see if they want to hire a short-term consultant. hummm.... Have PhD will travel?

    --
    As Nietsche famously said, "If you stare too long into the Abyss, 1d4 Tanar'ri of random type will attack you."