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Startup Combines CPU and DRAM
MojoKid writes "CPU design firm Venray Technology announced a new product design this week that it claims can deliver enormous performance benefits by combining CPU and DRAM on to a single piece of silicon. Venray's TOMI (Thread Optimized Multiprocessor) attempts to redefine the problem by building a very different type of microprocessor. The TOMI Borealis is built using the same transistor structures as conventional DRAM; the chip trades clock speed and performance for ultra-low low leakage. Its design is, by necessity, extremely simple. Not counting the cache, TOMI is a 22,000 transistor design. Instead of surrounding a CPU core with L2 and L3 cache, Venray inserted a CPU core directly into a DRAM design. A TOMI Borealis core connects eight TOMI cores to a 1Gbit DRAM with a total of 16 ICs per 2GB DIMM. This works out to a total of 128 processor cores per DIMM. That said, when your CPU has fewer transistors than an architecture that debuted in 1986, there is a good chance that you left a few things out--like an FPU, branch prediction, pipelining, or any form of speculative execution. Venray may have created a chip with power consumption an order of magnitude lower than anything ARM builds and more memory bandwidth than Intel's highest-end Xeons, but it's an ultra-specialized, ultra-lightweight core that trades 25 years of flexibility and performance for scads of memory bandwidth."
does it run GNU/Linux?
I'd love to see a beowulf cluster of these things...
Oh, wait..
Missed a D - better make that DUM-CRAP*.
I wonder, how much DUM-CRAP could we fit into a single PC?
* this name is by no means a reflection on what I think of the tech - it sounds like a pretty cool idea.
which is totally what she said
I heard you like to reduce maps, so I put a CPU in your RAM so you can hash while you map.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
Why in the world is people always saying the word Map Reduce nowerdays, I hear it every week atleast. Like it would be the solution to world war 3.
Since WWIII hasn't happened yet, you cannot rule out the fact that it *might* be the solution.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Signed, old assembly language programmer guy
I see what you did there.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
That's a bit shifty, don't you think? I don't mean to negate your point, but too, it's beyond my power to complement you -- I'm somewhat over a barrel. Perhaps if you add one to your argument, we'd have something else. Logically speaking. HCF.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.