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by coder543 34 days ago
EDIT: It's just not even worth arguing this point, so deleting my original, much longer comment. Abstract taxonomies can claim that Taalas is CIM, but this entirely and utterly misses the point, and misses what makes Taalas' approach special. If you told a room full of chip architects to go build "CIM for AI", they would not build a Taalas-like totally specialized chip, therefore it is not sufficient, and just muddies the conversation from my point of view. People have been doing "CIM" for decades and yet I've never seen anyone build a totally specialized chip at the scale of Taalas. And yes, you can (in theory) build an analog version of any computer, so of course you can build analog CIM, but "analog compute" is not inherently CIM, so conflating the two is just confusing.
2 comments
mdp2021 32 days ago
> It's just not even worth arguing this point

Pretty simply: the von Neumann architecture separates data storage and processing; we are now researching the alternatives - in all their forms, whatever allows to make NNs efficient; those alternatives basically focus on reducing the distance between stored data and its processing; some simply call stored data "memory"; we had the concept of "Compute in Memory" available; now some are calling "CIM" all of the relevant solutions that allow processing in the vicinity of the storage.

It is not the traditional CIM with the ALUs. Too bad. We can easily get the difference.

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mdp2021 34 days ago
I can't check everything right now, but for example, the divulgational from Rakesh Kumar mentiones "Analogue CIM".

And I do not get your rant about "analog computing", which has everything to do with NNs (otherwise, well, prove it): they started with that - they are basically that in fact. Analogue computing is a very great temptation since it would solve the issues of inefficiency in digital NNs. Unfortunately, it has drawbacks which are massive for big NNs. Taalas' seems to be the best compromise.

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mdp2021 31 days ago
(Note just for homekeeping: this replied to the original parent response, later edited. The parallel ("Pretty simply") replied to the edited response.)
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