back to article Alibaba teases a breakthrough chip, merging processor and memory

Alibaba's DAMO Academy has teased a chip that stacks logic and memory in 3D, and Chinese press suggest it represents an architecture that can bust the Von Neumann bottleneck. The DAMO Academy is Alibaba's blue sky research outfit. Founder Jack Ma dedicated it to "Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook" at its 2017 launch …

  1. AdmFubar

    If they have solved the heat dissipation issue for 3d, they might have something.

    1. Version 1.0 Silver badge

      I've been watching these Von Neumann computing bottlenecks for years now - these days I think that the Von Neumann bottleneck descriptions have just predicted a CPU climate change environment. We've seen so many "solutions" described over the years that have done nothing so I expect this latest "fix" will just sail on and then sink too.

      1. iron Silver badge

        Sounds to me like moving the problem around. Sure now you have faster on die memory but how much and what do you do when you need more? Replacing an expensive CPU for a RAM upgrade is a ridiculous idea that should only appeal to phone and console manufacturers.

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          That's true to an extent. But I bet a lot of laptop users would be quite happy with 8GB on-die and a socket for a "slow RAM" expansion (shades of Amiga memory expansion here :-)

          That would cope with many workloads and with proper memory management, could treat expansion RAM as a form of swapfile.

  2. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    Big Brother

    It it is that good...

    will Bejing

    1) allow the people out of China to present the paper?

    2) allow it to be sold to non CCP companies

    If the answer to the above includes a no then we can all move along as this is all way above our pay grades and hope that there are people working on this outside of China.

    1. martinusher Silver badge

      Re: It it is that good...

      >hope that there are people working on this outside of China.

      If you've been following the news in recent years you might have been led to believe that we've got all the ideas and stuff and we're working hard to ensure that the Chinese don't steal them. We're told repeatedly that the Chinese can't invent, only copy (we used to say the same about the Japanese, BTW) and we belittle their efforts in things like virus research as amateurish. So maybe we don't need to worry about their competition. Except....

      You may also have noticed that in the last few years we (in the US especially) haven't exactly been welcoming towards Chinese people working in research and technology. We've been investigating them -- and occasionally attempting to prosecute them -- as spies. One result is that the number of Chinese coming over here to study or work has dropped off significantly. That's no problem for the PRC -- they've got the infrastructure and capital. Sure, we're restricting their purchases of state of the art equipment but that just gives them the incentive to develop their own.

    2. david 12 Silver badge

      Re: It it is that good...

      Over the last 20 years, their thriving open-source electronics community has (1) only used Chinese documentation, and (2) only worked with Chinese partners.

      Perhaps the CCP likes it this way: perhaps the community just can't be arsed dealing with foreigners. Probably a bit of both.

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