New accelerator processor for genomic analysis

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Memory specialist Micron has announced a new accelerator processor that it claims outperforms Intel's chips when it comes to dealing with streaming data.

  • The "Automata Processor" was announced by the company on Monday and billed as a device that uses the inherent parallelism of memory architectures to speed the ingestion and processing of large data sets.
  • Potential applications of the chip include genomic analysis and various security tasks such as the classification of online video footage.
  • The chip should be available in 2014 and the company has taped out the first silicon, it said.
  • Each Automata Processor uses a DDR3-like memory interface, and will be made available either as standalone, or in DIMM modules. It has an inter-chip bus, and has a power draw of around 4 watts.

  • In tests, a cluster of 48 of the processors on a PCIe board comfortably beat a 48-chip cluster of Intel Xeon 5650s when trying to complete a tough 'Planted Motif Search' problem.

The design is based on an adaption of memory architecture and exploits "the inherent bit-parallelism of traditional SDRAM," according to a Micron paper describing the technology. This sets it apart from Intel's "Xeon Phi" accelerator, which gets its number-crunching skills from an array of many, many low-power wimpy x86 chips.

  • Automata processors should comfortably beat field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) on performance, the paper says. "We believe that our architecture also implies a new parallel programming paradigm".
  • As it is designed as an accelerator, it will need to piggyback on a typical processor, though this could take the form of a low-power ARM chip. It will also be tough to program for, though Micron says it is working with researchers to ease this issue.

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