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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

So this is like going from SMTP to IMAP ?

I didn't down-vote you, but if you were serious I think you should find a profession outside of technology.

I was almost serious, skimming through the diagram gave me the impression they were moving computation capabilities close to the data ~backend.

Oh ... I completely missed that interpretation (maybe I'm too close to these techniques). In any case, it's probably better to think of the system as a giant state machine in which the data are states and the operations are transitions. Its processing and memory co-mingled. You'll notice that it's got a very wide data width (not a new idea) that speeds it up tremendously for parallizeable tasks, but it's actually slowing down the "clock" since the memory itself is still the slowest part.

(I also upvoted you ... you shouldn't get penalized for an honest question)

Upvoted you. We need more insights like this than the document itself. The concept of state machine, PIM (processing in memory) and parallelization is the core, looks like Micro has some implementation now. That's why they call it an Automata Processor (AP).

What a rude, condescending thing to say to someone who is asking for help understanding something.

Given the later exchange between us ... I agree that it was rude and I'd like to apologize. I'm sorry.

I don't generally make excuses when I apologize because I think it diminishes the value of the apology itself. In this case I think it's fair to admit I thought he was trolling (and apparently so did his down-voters).

In any case, hopefully I'll be a better man tomorrow ... iron sharpens iron.

It was 5% trollish in the delivery for I could have been a little more explicit rather than just throwing my metaphor out in the wind. Happy that 1) I wasn't too far off 2) the situation is resolved.

ps: the explanation for my quick oneliner is that I often see very limited protocols (say FTP, or SMTP) that require many round trip over the wire where it would now (I understand back in the days servers were anemic) make sense to distribute the computation a little on both side. Not unlike memory IMHO.

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