Seems like a nice idea — instead of the stark CPU/GPU divide we have today, this would fit somewhere in the middle.

Reminds me slightly of the Cell processor, with its dedicated SPUs for fast processing, orchestrated by a traditional CPU. But we all saw how successful that was (: And that had some pretty big backing.

Overcoming the inertia of the current computing hardware landscape is such a huge task. Maybe they can find some niche(s).

Does anyone know what they mean by "wave synchronization"? That's supposedly their trick to prevent all those parallel CPUs from blocking waiting for data. Found a reference to something called that for transputers, from 1994.[1] May be something else.

Historically, this has been a dead end. Most problems are hard to cut up into pieces for such machines. But now that there's much interest in neural nets, there's more potential for highly parallel computers. Neural net operations are very regular. The inner loop for backpropagation is about a page of code. This is a niche, but it seems to be a trillion dollar niche.

Neural net operations are so regular they belong on purpose-built hardware. Something even more specialized than a GPU. We're starting to see "AI chips" in that space. It's not clear that something highly parallel and more general purpose than a GPU has a market niche. What problem is it good for?

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/014193...

Discussion (28 points, 3 months ago, 32 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40650662

Does anyone have any knowledge/understanding on how this is (or isn't?) fundamentally different from Intel's Xeon Phi?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi

This is based on legitimate (although second-tier) academic research that appears to combine aspects of GPU-style SIMD/SIMT with Tera-style massive multithreading. (main paper appears to be https://www.utupub.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/164790/MPP-TPA-... )

Historically, the chance of such research turning into a chip you can buy is zero.

How is this different from an integrated gpu other than it presumably doesn't do graphics.

When will we get the “Mill” cpu?

I'm probably missing something but why not use gpus for parallel processing?

I’m still waiting for a clockless core… some day

Whenever I see the word "fintech" this is the article I am expecting, Instead I am disappointment with some drivel about banks.

I am not sure what is wrong with me, you would think my brain would have figured it out by now, but it always parses it wrong. perhaps if it were "finctech" that would help.

“Now, the team is working on a compiler for their PPU” good luck!

> Now, the team is working on a compiler for their PPU

I think a language is also required here. Extracting parallelism from C++ is non trivial.

Tell us something new, please.