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Scientists Turn Memory Chips Into Processors To Speed Up Computing Tasks (sciencedaily.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Daily: A team of international scientists have found a way to make memory chips perform computing tasks, which is traditionally done by computer processors like those made by Intel and Qualcomm. This means data could now be processed in the same spot where it is stored, leading to much faster and thinner mobile devices and computers. This new computing circuit was developed by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) in collaboration with Germany's RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Juelich, one of the largest interdisciplinary research centers in Europe. It is built using state-of-the-art memory chips known as Redox-based resistive switching random access memory (ReRAM). Developed by global chipmakers such as SanDisk and Panasonic, this type of chip is one of the fastest memory modules that will soon be available commercially. However, instead of storing information, NTU Assistant Professor Anupam Chattopadhyay in collaboration with Professor Rainer Waser from RWTH Aachen University and Dr Vikas Rana from Forschungszentrum Juelich showed how ReRAM can also be used to process data. This discovery was published recently in Scientific Reports. By making the memory chip perform computing tasks, space can be saved by eliminating the processor, leading to thinner, smaller and lighter electronics. The discovery could also lead to new design possibilities for consumer electronics and wearable technology.
like using truth tables in ROM as logic devices ?
It's Connection Machine all over again! Or transputers! Come to think of it, the lines tend to be blurry... But putting some fine-grained computational power directly onto memory chips seems sort of logical for some kinds of computation.
Ezekiel 23:20
They don't even know the definition of a ternary number system. They describe a quaternary and call it a ternary.
Interesting to compare this to Micron's Automata processor, which is using standard DRAM for computations, taking advantage of massive parallelism for specialized tasks involving unstructured data. But this application is for a specialized RAM which probably has less general use. https://www.micronautomata.com...
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
You forgot one thing. Thin = fragile... catches fire or explodes because the battery needs to expand during usage
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
Please don't confuse research papers with journalists' descriptions of research papers.
Here's the original paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
In it's conclussion, the paper clearly states "0, 1, 2".
Without the "3" that the journalist seems to have added out of his own ignorance for some inexplicable reason.
Popular science journalism more often than not badly fucks up perfectly reasonable research papers.
Remember that the people writing up these pieces are journalists, not experts or even trained in the fields they write about.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Without the "3" that the journalist seems to have added out of his own ignorance for some inexplicable reason.
The more the memorrier!
Ezekiel 23:20
In a way, all current number systems are quaternary. ;-)
Ezekiel 23:20
Is this a discovery or an invention? Is it a case of making ReRAM do something it wasn't designed or expected to do, or has someone built a new thing that connects to/updates ReRAM?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Ah! That link should have been in the /. summary. Thanks a lot!
Not exactly, but when you drop that impressive new gadget on the bar the girl next to you will assume anybody who has such a fancy gadget must also have a big penis - and by the time she finds out the truth she'll be unlikely to change her mind about where she wants it to be put.
This system was first developed with extremely large, expensive cars. In some parts of the US it works well with extremely large, expensive guns. The use of it with tech gadgets remains heavily advertised but only slightly successful.
Please note that this technique has never worked on any women with an IQ higher than that of a dog. It presumably could also work on MEN with an IQ of dog-level or lower but their response to concluding you have a big penis tends to be violent.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Unless I'm missing something, this won't result in "faster computing" but rather having more bandwidth for RAM.
Currently, all computer processors in the market are using the binary system, which is composed of two states – either 0 or 1. For example, the letter A will be processed and stored as 01000001, an 8-bit character.
However, the prototype ReRAM circuit built by Asst Prof Chattopadhyay and his collaborators processes data in four states instead of two. For example, it can store and process data as 0, 1, 2, or 3, known as Ternary number system.
Because ReRAM uses different electrical resistance to store information, it could be possible to store the data in an even higher number of states, hence speeding up computing tasks beyond current limitations.
If they wanted, they could already encode more data per bus line and put a translator by the RAM. However, literally none of this is talking about doing any computing using memory. It kinda seems like maybe a non-technical person wrote this press release.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Are you writing this on your 2 kilos shoebox sized phone?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The 3 state RAM doesn't actually do computation.... if you want that... take a look at an old idea of mine...http://bitgrid.blogspot.com/
A memory chip is not a processor.
The *summary of* the article didn't say what the article did.
Nothing the summary says is close to what is true.
NO MEMORY UNIT WILL PERFORM CPU FUNCTIONS at less than 2 orders of magnitude worse (that's 1/100 performance/power) today.
There's no "discovery" here. You can use stones and sticks to compute. Using a memory chip is far more advanced. And just as stupid.
Slow day on slashdot?
Yes. I signed this post. Because I'm in the industry. I'm not a troll. I get to call out when people put out stupid articles where they summarize stupid research papers that have nothing to do with reality land. Like this one.
E
That's why I don't go to intelligence briefings. They're full of fake information.
Both the summary and the article don't know what they are talking about. Reading these will only confuse you.
Read the paper here instead : http://www.nature.com/articles...
To summarize :
- ReRAM is a promising type of non-volatile memory.
- Earlier, it was discovered that ReRAM cells could be used to perform computations. This is not news.
- Multi-level ReRAM, which is able to store more than 2 states per cell exist. This is similar to MLC/TLC for flash memory. This is not news.
- The new thing is that with using 6-state cells, they managed to do calculations in base 3 directly. More generally, they said it would be possible to do base-n using 2n-state cells. This is good because higher bases means less cells are required for the same computation.
Nah, I wouldn't be caught dead with an iPhone Plus. (or any iphone, for that matter)
Thank you for saying the things I was thinking.
Last post!
I'm sceptical about the replace the processor entirely thing. Another interesting thought is that FPGAs tend to now use memory rather than true programmable transistors. If you combine memory and processing it can have some very nasty and bizarre implications.
You could wind up with Slashdot, e.g.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I'm inclined to say that many of the people writing up these pieces aren't really journalists, either.
Log in or piss off.
The concept of "Processor-in-Memory" (PIM) has been extensively researched in the high-performance computing community to avoid moving data to a distant processor for certain operations. Nothing came of it.
Over the decades, architectures have been introduced that included operations like increment and decrement in memory. These atomic operations were useful in building parallel computing constructs.
Try to understand, the Journalist only mentioned "Hey this could make stuff smaller/lighter/thinner" because he is a twit who is trying to explain the potential benefits of information he got in a press release he didn't understand about a paper he didn't read to a bunch of other twits that the publisher presumes is gonna be the reader-base. The fact that processing can be offloaded to the memory has nothing to do with the ability to make better wearable tech, and the original authors never suggested anything even close to this; because the original authors aren't complete morons.
Resistive switching memory *is* memristance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Leon Chua has been researching memristors for about half a century, and R. Stanley Williams has many article and lectures about how memristors can be used in place of NAND gates in CPUs (i.e. to perform computing tasks) as well as memory. I encourage everyone to use the right terminology when discussing and introducing memristors to a new audience, especially since they are being rediscovered at an increasing rate recently. R. Stanley Williams claims that it took a long time to collect a knowledge base of research papers and journal articles on the subject, because everyone was using a different phrase for "memristors".
DRAM process has additional requirements in order to reliably create storage capacitors in the small size the process node can sustain. Microprocessors are best manufactured in logic-optimized processes. You usually sacrifice area if you implement logic on DRAM, and you risk much more if you try to implement DRAM on logic-optimized process.
If you produce a lot of junk because you tried to do something that a process flow is not reliably able to do, then your costs skyrocket and you may have been better off in mounting two different chips in a multi-chip module (MCM).
It's certainly interesting to make novel designs in a lab, but it can be difficult to produce large quantities cheaply if the process flow is not ideal for your design.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Certainly a DRAM-derivative chip will have literal assloads of space for LUTs. But it'll lack the other magic-sauce component of those other reprogrammable logic devices, FPGAs and CPLDs: routing. The result is typically a non-pipelined quasi-CPU with as big a machine state as there's dedicated RAM for it (somewhere around 40 bits at most, these days), on top of which a proper CPU gets written (using some other ginormous chunk of RAM).
And this ain't new, or difficult, or novel in any way.
What I wonder is how this stuff made it into an article about an up-and-coming DRAM-derivative memory technology.
There are reasons CPU and RAM are separated. These are good reasons. The whole article is unmitigated nonsense, except for a very small set of special-purpose computations that can already be done with FPGAs anyways.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Cray, of course:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-3/SSS