Many thanks.
That’s interesting. Sorting is quite a common algorithm. If there’s something to be won from hardware specific to it not also lost in spinning up that hardware I’m curious why it hasn’t been done before.
Huh. Never seen dedicated sorting hardware that I know of. But cool. ML really isn’t my area so can’t speak to that.
The last time I programmed a neural net was in high school and two layers was considered advanced. When I saw your post, I tried looking it up but only found a bunch of links where the goal was to train neural networks to write sorting algorithms. Which is not what we’re looking for. So not sure.
. Maybe they will!
No those are not? I mean, some of them are. Maybe that’s the list from the prior Samsung lawsuit. Also don’t think those descriptions are right. Also, “infringed” shouldn’t be in quotes.
I just designed one in my head. It would have a ton of adders, a large dedicated set of registers, with pointers into a set of ordinals. Don’t know that it would actually speed anything up, though
I just designed one in my head. It would have a ton of adders, a large dedicated set of registers, with pointers into a set of ordinals. Don’t know that it would actually speed anything up, though
If it is likely to get significant use, it would definitely speed things up at least a bit merely by dint of other stuff being able to other stuff at the same time.
I’m just wondering if it’s possible to make it big enough to pay for the overhead of shifting things into and out of the unit, in actual use. I have some experience designing big parallel comparators, and they aren’t all that small. You’d also have to reduce the sort function to, say, an unsigned long int comparison by some sort of hashing, which presumably you’d do one time prior to loading the unit, but that should be O
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I assume that at some array sizes it would be worth it. But yeah I imagine the arrays would have to be quite big and regular to warrant this sort of thing instead of another E core or somethingI’m just wondering if it’s possible to make it big enough to pay for the overhead of shifting things into and out of the unit, in actual use. I have some experience designing big parallel comparators, and they aren’t all that small. You’d also have to reduce the sort function to, say, an unsigned long int comparison by some sort of hashing, which presumably you’d do one time prior to loading the unit, but that should be O
Hehe I did imagine that was supposed to be O
. Whole sorting still bounded by O(n log) at best though so the potentially additional O ( n ) isn’t too important for large enough arrays. But if n needs to be that large the point also goes away a bit for consumer use cases. And for large enough Ns we become IO bound as well. I’d love to see where any hardware accelerated sorting is currently being used
Yeah, me too. Seems to me that it might make sense for certain special-purpose machines (or sub portions of special purpose algorithms - sort vertices by x-coordinate?). But so much sorting involves an array of pointers to objects where you are sorting using complex criteria on properties of properties stored in non-sequential memory addresses - there would often be a lot of work to set things up before you could even let the algorithm do its thing. And then you’d never be able to fit the entire data set into the thing at once (because if your data set is small you are probably ok using a general purpose processor), so now you are dividing things up and merging the results, which still ends up being a lot of swapping.Hehe I did imagine that was supposed to be O
