Who Ordered Memory Fences on an x86?

[BCS]

Reply to Nick,


> Yea, I've been hearing a lot about that. Be interesting to see what
> happens. Console gaming will probably be the best place to watch to
> see how that turns out (what with Sony's Cell and all).
> 
> Also, a few years ago I heard about some research on a "smart memory"
> chip that would allow certain basic operations to be performed within
> the memory chip itself (basically turning the memory cells into
> registers, AIUI). IIRC, the benefit they were aiming for was reducing
> the bottleneck of CPU<->RAM bus traffic. I haven't heard anything
> about it since then, but between that and the "lots of simple CPU
> cores" predictions, I wouldn't be surprised (though I'm not sure I
> would bet on it either) to eventually see traditional memory and
> processors (and maybe even hard drives) become replaced by a hybrid
> "CPU/RAM" chip.
> 

One option people are throwing around in this is the Field Programmable Processor 
Array, think a FPGA with more complex gates.