Samsung calls for new CPU design

The NAND giant believes massively parallel networks could lead to more advanced but cheaper, less power-hungry devices.

Samsung researchers are working on a new approach to computing that could revamp data centers, said a corporate strategist. Separately, at an event hosted by the South Korea giant, a startup sketched out plans to bring magnetic resonance imaging to a wearable consumer device.

Computers should mimic the brain, blending memory and processing in massively parallel networks, said Young Sohn, chief strategy officer of Samsung Electronics. He called for lower-power and -cost devices that put memory and processing functions more closely together.

"I'm encouraging entrepreneurs that it's time for a new start, for us it's about a more memory-centric architecture," said Sohn in an interview with EE Times. "The [Intel] x86 architecture has limited memory lanes, but why limit memory when high-speed memory bandwidth is critical," he said.

Samsung has both internal projects and investments in startups that could yield results over the next three years, said Sohn. The company invested more than $200 million in 60 startups last year.

Sohn declined to describe any internal research projects, but mentioned GraphCore, a UK-based startup working on a server coprocessor for machine learning, as one of Samsung's investments that is "challenging Nvidia." Today's computer architecture "is not up to date, it's too heavy and can be much more nimble, there's a lot of waste," he said.

To read the full article, go to EE Times.