Other
Hardware Approaches
-
Besides
the specialized NNW chips and systems
discussed above, a few other approaches can be mentioned.
-
Digital
Signal Processors (DSP), for example, are
optimized to do fast multiple-accumulates.
Some accelerator
cards have used DSPs.
-
The newest
Intel MMX Pentiums,
in fact, have parallel processing built-in.
-
MMX Pentiums
have 4 extra PE's with a limited instruction set to execute in parallel
on different data.
-
Each
of the PE's can do a multiply and add in one clock cycle.
-
The MMX
provides for 4 multiply and add instructions to execute.
- California
Scientific's BrainMaker NNW program, for example, is now optimized
for MMX.
-
BrainMaker
is accelerated up to a factor of 4 over non-MMX processors.
- See
their Benchmarks.
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