From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Mar 16 2000 - 06:39:43 MST
On Wed, 15 Mar 2000, Spike Jones wrote about the FUZION 150:
> Holy schlaMOLY here it comes:
Hmmm... well someone there has trouble counting since one story says
80+ million. But IBM is going for 170 million!
See: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2466014,00.html
> PixelFusion's FUZION 150 is a 0.25 micron, single-chip,
Gads, its obsolete before it hits the street. SotA is 0.18 microns now
while IBM is going to 0.13 microns Q3 next year. If the fabless
companies get into a position of being 2 generations behind, you
have to wonder if they will be able to compete.
> 24 megabits of on-chip embedded DRAM.
Great! A *real* PIM (processor in memory) chip that you can buy.
> This ultra high-performance chip delivers more than 1.5 trillion
> operations or 3 billion floating-point operations per second,
Well the 1.5 TeraOps are integer operations, but if I can do "synapse"
arithmetic with them, with ~700 of them you get a peta-op which is about
in the middle of estimates for "brain-equivalence". However since it
consumes about 30W, that works out to ~20,000 Watts. I doubt I'm
going to run it at home. Gotta do something about that.
Of course you get interesting architectures, here is my 1 W transmeta
chip doing general purpose computing connected to my 30 W video
chip to display all the fancy graphics...
> along with 600 gigabytes per second of on-chip memory bandwidth.
This is what PIM *really* buys you which is great. It isn't the
arithmetic the brain does that gives it the power, its the
internal communciations bandwidth. So with this much on chip
bandwidth a few thousand of them (with optical interconnects) gets
in the ballpark of the bandwidth in the brain.
Now you did miss the *interesting* thing about the chip -- it comes
in a 1060 pin HPBGA (high performance ball grid array?) package
and measures 4.5 cm square (big!).
So, we assume in ~10 years or less we can knock an order of magnitude
off of the power budget and # of processors. So, looks like by 2010
we will get me a desktop machine with a reasonable power budget and
something close to brain capacity. So we only have 10 years to figure
out how to program the thing.
Robert
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