Mill Computing, Inc. › Forums › The Mill › Architecture › Any comments on Imagine Stream Architecture?

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  • acruise
    Participant
    November 10, 2015 at 4:47 pm
    Post count: 3
    #2074 |

    Hey folks,

    I’ve been eagerly watching Mill videos since they started leaking out and am pretty interested in your progress. Just now I asked a colleague what he thought of the Mill architecture, and he pointed me to something he worked with, the Imagine Stream Architecture, http://cva.stanford.edu/projects/imagine/project/im_arch.html.

    Would anyone care to compare and contrast?

    Thanks! 🙂

  • Ivan Godard
    Keymaster
    November 10, 2015 at 5:09 pm
    Post count: 689
    #2075

    Imagine seems to be a straightforward implementation of a stream processor design, heavily indebted to early Cray designs. If your problem is stream-shaped then it should suit your needs. The market for it is graphics and network data-planes, and the competition is GPUs and custom proprietary network chips. It isn’t (and doesn’t claim to be) suitable for general-purpose applications.

    The Mill is a general-purpose architecture. While we can do a better job on graphics or stream loads than other GP architectures, we are not suitable for the sort of dedicated heavy loads that one might want a GPU (or Imagine) for. The two architectures are complimentary – I can see a network product with a Mill for the control plane and an Imagine for the data plane

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