

Adapteva founder promises 4,000-cores with new Epiphany architecture - ghalfacree
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/5/6/epiphany-promises-performance-breakthrough/

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iskander
>Olofsson has a new idea - or, specifically, a variation on an old one...it
was common for a central processor to have a 'math co-processor' chip
alongside it - a secondary processor which was designed specifically to carry
out floating point arithmetic at speeds significantly faster than the main
processor

This is exactly how people are currently using GPUs right now. How is this
architecture better than a Fermi?

>"A guy straight out of college who's done a course in C programming can take
a program and run it on our machine. There's no new constructs to run - you
can take a program with legacy code and run it straight out of the box on our
machine, and you can't do that on GPU."

If they're using only static compilation, this is very unlikely to be true. A
few thousand Ph.D. theses have been sunk into parallelizing imperative
programs. Despite the accumulation of sophisticated compiler techniques, it
doesn't really work without extensive annotations and cooperation from the
programmer. The programmer often ruins potential parallelism by accidentally
creating dependencies between loop iterations. Even when analyzing ideal code,
the program text doesn't contain sufficient information about the data size to
create a good partition.

However, there's some small chance this isn't empty hype and they've actually
made some cool breakthrough in runtime parallelization of imperative code. In
that case, though, why would they be hyping vaporous hardware rather than just
applying their fancy JIT compiler to existing multicore systems?

~~~
sedachv
"A few thousand Ph.D. theses have been sunk into parallelizing imperative
programs."

This waste of talent continues to piss me off to no end. Why would people
willingly spend time on this problem?

~~~
soundsop
Because the reward of a breakthrough is extremely high.

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thesz
This is actually a Transputer, side view.

This will suffer from many Transputer's sins and some new ones.

I did a research on chip interconnects, the uniform grid interconnect had
shown some unpleasant behaviours, like sudden deadlocks.

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aidenn0
Okay I Olofsson completely failed to establish ethos with me when he called
MIPS a "great architecture" Anybody who has done systems programming on MIPS
knows how painful it is (particularly in pre V2)

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andrewcooke
anyone have more info? their site <http://www.adapteva.com/index.php> doesn't
have much (no white papers)

