Did anyone mention....
that the name Burroughs was the name of a computer company?
4 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Nov 2013
The fundamental problem exposed by this silly fiasco is the pervasive lack of any kind of software hygiene in much software today. Without the common courtesy of interface management, what is exported and what is imported, and what is expected of all that, this kind of problem is pervasive. This is simply Bad Programming. Look up David Tilbrook's USENIX paper about Software Hygiene from, oh, 25 years ago now.
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!)