On Monday 14 April 2008 04:56:18 am, Steve Richfield wrote: > ... My present > efforts are now directed toward a new computer architecture that may be more > of interest to AGI types here than Dr. Eliza. This new architecture should > be able to build new PC internals for about the same cost, using the same > fabrication facilities, yet the processors will run ~10,000 times faster > running single-thread code.
This (massively-parallel SIMD) is perhaps a little harder than you seem to think. I did my PhD thesis on it and led a multi-million-dollar 10-year ARPA-funded project to develop just such an architecture. The first mistake everybody makes is to forget that the bottleneck for existing processors isn't computing power at all, it's memory bandwidth. All the cruft on a modern processor chip besides the processor is there to ameliorate that problem, not because they aren't smart enough to put more processors on. The second mistake is to forget that processor and memory silicon fab use different processes, the former optimized for fast transistors, the latter for dense trench capacitors. You won't get both at once -- you'll give up at least a factor of ten trying to combine them over the radically specialized forms. The third mistake is to forget that nobody knows how to program SIMD. They can't even get programmers to adopt functional programming, for god's sake; the only thing the average programmer can think in is BASIC, or C which is essentially machine-independent assembly. Not even LISP. APL, which is the closest approach to a SIMD language, died a decade or so back. Now frankly, a real associative processor (such as described in my thesis -- read it) would be very useful for AI. You can get close to faking it nowadays by getting a graphics card and programming it GPGPU-style. I quit architecture and got back into the meat of AI because I think that Moore's law has won, and the cycles will be there before we can write the software, so it's a waste of time to try end-runs. Associative processing would have been REALLY useful for AI in the 80's, but we can get away without it, now. Josh ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
