The prototype for a revolutionary new general-purpose computer processor, which has the potential of reaching trillions of calculations per second, has been designed and built by a team of computer scientists at The University of Texas at Austin.
The new processor, known as TRIPS (Tera-op, Reliable, Intelligently adaptive Processing System), could be used to accelerate industrial, consumer and scientific computing.
Professors Stephen Keckler, Doug Burger and Kathryn McKinley have been working on underlying technology that culminated in the TRIPS prototype for the past seven years. Their research team designed and built the hardware prototype chips and the software that runs on the chips.
“The TRIPS prototype is the first on a roadmap that will lead to ultra-powerful, flexible processors implemented in nanoscale technologies,” said Burger, associate professor of computer sciences.
TRIPS is a demonstration of a new class of processing architectures called Explicit Data Graph Execution (EDGE). Unlike conventional architectures that process one instruction at a time, EDGE can process large blocks of information all at once and more efficiently.
Current “multicore” processing technologies increase speed by adding more processors, which individually may not be any faster than previous processors.
Adding processors shifts the burden of obtaining better performance to software programmers, who must assume the difficult task of rewriting their code to run well on a potentially large number of processors.
“EDGE technology offers an alternative approach when the race to multicore runs out of steam,” said Keckler, associate professor of computer sciences.
Each TRIPS chip contains two processing cores, each of which can issue 16 operations per cycle with up to 1,024 instructions in flight simultaneously. Current high-performance processors are typically designed to sustain a maximum execution rate of four operations per cycle.
Though the prototype contains two 16-wide processors per chip, the research team aims to scale this up with further development.
Source University of Texas at Austin
weI’m wondered most of todays (binary) logic problems have a single input flow of instructions So what is the use of having so many calculations side by side? It is powerfull but where, in what fields would this be required. I dont think normal PC would require it (programes with 1024 threads are unlikely). I can imagine it would be handy in copmutated biochemics but what would the other target fields be ???
Did someone say pie? I love pie…
???????? ????
comments is on fire!
I think the key consideration when designing an architecture for general use is the programmers. If you can make something which provides a simple interface to users at the lowest level (that is provides a very straight forward instruction set) then I’d expect adoption to be highly encouraged. Of course, there needs to also be economical benefits all way around. If the chip is expensive as hell, hard to obtain in bulk, unstable, unscalable and so on, then there’s going to be no real reason to adopt it at all.
Given that intel announced today that they’re opening things up, I suspect that it will be easier for alternatives such as this to be adapted to work with existing PCs. If this CPU could provide even some sort of x86 emulation at the low level while keeping alternative features readily available, then it stands a great chance at being a success.
I wish them the best, I may have to consider Austin now for my master’s, I can’t wait to really get hard core with this stuff…
I just want to say something to the naysayers. If you read more closely, this work is being funded by DARPA. If that is your criteria for predicting failure, just look to the Internet, another DARPA-funded creation. Reading further on, the research team is not just creating another “academic” solution, but is pursuing all avenues that will provide an end-user usable solution – hardware, software, the whole package. It’s taken them about 7 years to get this far, and if DARPA is still funding them after 7 years, then there must be something real to this.
Um… A wide (and ridiculously long?) processor pipe does not invalidate the usefulness of a processor.
Specialized chips are seen everywhere; you DO know what memory controllers and GPUs do, right? Please?
Programmable Logic Circuits are not evil; they’re used in everything from your car to your oven.
You are insanely paranoid and should go away
EDGE doesn’t “issue” instructions in the same way that a typical processor does, but instead issues data to a set of execution units that have been pre-issued with instructions. The allows it to offer considerable parallelism without difficult programming. It would be worthwhile reading the resources available at the home web site here http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~trips/ before posting more.
As for making it open source… ever tried to work on something for seven years without corporate backing?
This looks like todays graphic cards chips, like the G80 or more like the RV650, RV600, RV630 and RV610. The R600 can make ~0.5TFLOPS.
Basically this is an expansion of the programmable circuits used for decades by the NSA to crack ciphers. The news is that it allows an automatic programming of the circuits.
The result is that only very repetitive tasks are optimized in circuit programming. This works well with cipher cracking, war-weather-economic-social simulation/prediction that is been used for decades.
An U.S. general once said about the end of WW-II: The germans lost the War but the NoZIs won it! … This is a better tool for them to do more efficiently what they have been done for the last 50 years. The military-industrial complex will appreciate!
To the public this tool is useless. So take your ideas out!
You won’t need it. Period. It is not for you!
Cheers.
Explicit?
I believe that there are more NOPs eating the cache like any VLIW processor!!!
Asserting that “the x86 processor still reigns supreme” shows a very narrow view of computing. There are twice as many mobile phone users as Internet users; very few of these phones run x86 processors. If you look at the number of deployed processors, x86 is a long way behind ARM. In 2004, there were 3/4 billion ARM processors shipped, x86 has only recently reached 100 million. In many fields, x86 is as irrelevant as it always has been.
As long as GCC can target the new processor then GNU/Linux and a huge amount of software will be near by. Thanks to free software its potentially a very different scenario now compared to when the i386 was just introduced and everyone focused on x86 code.
And if this is not an x86-based processor, then it will likely never gain widespread acceptance. Too many “next-gen” processors have come and gone in the past two decades, and yet, the x86 processor still reigns supreme.
Yeah, just like T. Rex. All of the other dinosaurs that came along afterward were unable to supplant the King. Oh…wait…all the dinosaurs are gone and replace by newer developments. The fact that x86′s have not yet been supplanted doesn’t provide any evidence that they won’t be. Better technology and a reasonable price will prevail.
instead of giving this away to some privately held company.
That way, all participants may profit from their development instead of just one…
a processor that can run vista
Ok.. so it can ISSUE 16 instructions per clock, but how many clocks does it take to actually process each instruction? Is VERY long instruction processing time the reason for ’1024 instructions in flight’? That looks like 64 or more clocks to complete a given instruction. If there are variable completion rates, how the heck do you sync up the many threads you have ‘flying’
AHAHAHA
Almost like a pie, but not quite.
IS A QUAD CORE TRIPS PC!
*afk making patent*
ditto on the vista…;)
Well, if you are going to quote figures…at least be correct. The X86 architecture did NOT just recently pass 100 million. In 2007 ALONE, there were 257.5 MILLION PCs sold worldwide and OVER 90% of those PCs sold are based on the X86 architecture.
Over 90% of the world’s PCs and servers use X86
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584-6172745.html
Worldwide PC shipments increased to 257.5 million in 2007
http://www.linuxelectrons.com/news/hardware/11928/pc-shipments-increase-2007
The installed base of Internet users (internet or not) is well over 1 Billion.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
again…over 90% of those users are on X86 machines
There are over 2 billion cell phones in use in the world…however, they are based on several different CPU architectures, plus there are older phones still in use in many developing countries that are based on proprietary chips that aren’t even in use any more. (Unlike old PCs which were STILL X86 based.)
Based on almost 1/4 of a billion X86 machines shipped in 2007, seems pretty obvious that in the DECADES of X86 processors being on the market, they passed a BILLION a long time ago, much less 100 million.
Cell phones, while great devices for communication and an ever increasing number of multimedia functions are still not “General computing” devices, which is what this processor is supposed to be.
ivaedocvunf@gmail.com
There is a discussion presently going on regarding a comparison of FPGA, GPU and the Cell/B.E processors for the purpose of computational computing. See here: http://www.simbiosys.ca/blog/2008/05/03/the-fast-and-the-furious-compare-cellbe-gpu-and-fpga/
I am interested in your opinions on GPU versus Cell processor.