Micron takes on Intel with 'breakthrough' processor for streaming data

more details please

What's the programming model? How are DRAM lines utilised? What's the degree of parallelism available? How did a cluster of 4W devices beat a cluster of 95W Xeons?

"conventional CPU architectures can have anywhere from 2 to 64 processors"

That's what Micron say, anyway. Maybe someone needs to tell HP - both IA64-based Integrity (RIP) and AMD64-based Proliant (somewhat more "conventional") can beat 64 at the top of the range, assuming we're counting logical processors not processor sockets. Others probably can beat it too. I wonder who makes HP's memory for them...

Source (and further reading):

http://www.micron.com/about/innovations/automata-processing

Why not use an FPGA?

"the AP is a scalable, two-dimensional fabric comprised of thousands to millions of interconnected processing elements, each programmed to perform a targeted task or operation."

Sounds almost like an FPGA,

Tough to program.

"It will also be tough to program for, though Micron says it is working with researchers to ease this issue."

They had better be looking at an OpenCL extension maximizing default usage.

Why not <foo> ?

FPGAs spend a lot of silicon on the regular connectivity fabric and doing logic ops via table lookup.

Specialized hardware can often do a specific job in fewer square millimeters of silicon and that

ultimately determines the cost of a chip. FPGAs get agility at the cost of chip area. A chip specifically

designed for implementing automata (DFSMs) can win the chip area battle.

Logic-in-memory processing, as has been observed here, is not new although it might have

finally found a niche deep enough to make the economics work. The first SIGARCH meeting

I attended in the middle 70s at SMU in Dallas had a lot of submissions with various versions

of logic-in-memory. The problem was that the logic had to be implemented in 7400 TTL (CMOS

was still RCA's greatest parlor trick - cf the COSMAC 1802) and the memory was equally

painfully expensive. Several designs worked to integrate processing logic in "processor per

disk head" disk drives with the goal of doing various kinds of searches and database operations

as the bits few by under the heads.

Now, however, there is an increasing need to process a transaction stream in real-time (eg, high

frequency stock trading) and those also have significant economic value. The advent of "analytics"

which do large summarization operations on databases has made "column store" databases a

financially successful space, and the ability to hardware assist those operations with the likes of

the Micron part certainly has high-quality appeal.

But it's also true that a lot of money (your tax dollars, actually) has been spent on hardware search

machines which have proven to be "less than completely successful" for reasons relating to the designers' understanding of the formal machinery than chip design issues, but they were unsuccessful anyway.

I commend Micron for taking the risk and trying something New. FusionIO did and was rewarded hansomely, as was Data Domain. I cannot claim to be unbiased on the area in general, but

i look forward to learning a lot more about their part and how they see it being used. (And then,

of course, will be how people actually use it!)