Alibaba’s DAMO Academy has teased that the company is working on a new chip model to overcome the von Neumann bottleneck. The company aims to stack logic and memory in a single chip with the new model. It seems to have the potential to break the Von Neumann bottleneck and represent a new approach to the chip design process.
The DAMO Academy is Alibaba’s blue-sky research outfit dedicated to “Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook” at its 2017 launch.
Chinese sources reported that Alibaba’s new chip model would bust the von Neumann bottleneck – the limitation encountered by most computers because of the internal bus speeds.
Alibaba’s new chip model aims to overcome the von Neumann bottleneck
Tricks are used to improve the performance of the devices, such as caches, speculative execution, and systems-on-chips that eliminate the need to communicate with memory outside the processor. However, the bottleneck is a fundamental problem in computers using the von Neumann architecture of discrete processing and storage.
Alibaba has hinted that the new chip model has already been developed but gave no further information.
It has also been reported that at the February 2022 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, a presentation features tantalisingly entitled “184QPS/W 64Mb/mm2 3D Logic-to-DRAM Hybrid Bonding with Process-Near-Memory Engine for Recommendation System” in its stream on ML Chips for Emerging Applications. Of the 19 co-authors listed for the talk, 15 work at the DAMO Academy.
While waiting for the talk, Alibaba has released the source code for its Yun on Chip (YoC) technology.
Learn about source code for Alibaba’s Yun on Chip (YoC) technology before the new chip model
YoC is a full-stack technology development platform for IoT devices designed for low power, low cost, and fast processing. It’s a development platform that can be tuned to Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, audio, and multimedia needs. Alibaba told The Register that it could also be tuned to the needs of IoT applications, including mesh networking and motor control.
The Chinese reports haven’t said where we’ll see the Yun designs, but the Xuantie cores it opens sourced in October 2021 popped up on the GitHub repo of its chip design subsidiary T-Head Semiconductor.
