Re: In-Memory Computing

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

Has anyone heard of this idea? It apparently delegates some
lower-level computing functions directly to the memory itself, to get
a speedup from doing everything in the CPU. It seems to be an
outgrowth of the “memristor” component that was discovered/invented by
some researchers at HP a few decades ago.

Delegating memory operations to lower layers in the hierarchy is one of those wheel of re-incarnation ideas that pop back up every decade or two.
You typically start with shared atomic operations and very simple computation, like a LOCK XADD, then once you are on this slippery slope you quickly decide to add more advanced capabilities, quickly ending up with something like Bunny Chang's distributed virtual machine which can securely distribute its code anywhere in the cluster.
Taken to its extreme, any cloud datacenter works this way, but at a far higher granularity.
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"