<story><title>Neural network spotted deep inside Samsung&apos;s Galaxy S7 silicon brain</title><url>http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/22/samsung_m1_core/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dingo_bat</author><text>This is literally insane. I&amp;#x27;ve never heard of a neural net branch predictor.&lt;p&gt;Edit: my layman knowledge about branch prediction and neural networks is showing its gross inadequacy :&amp;#x2F;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gcr</author><text>Branch prediction strategies can be learned, just like any other model. I could certainly see something like this outperforming the huge bag of hand-tuned optimization strategies for branch prediction anyway. It could save some silicon.&lt;p&gt;Even a simple dot product can be called a &amp;quot;neural network,&amp;quot; albeit a small uninteresting one. Your features could be (say) the state of cache, the number of jumps, the number of recent stalls &amp;#x2F; stack size &amp;#x2F; returns, and so on. Put them into a 10-dimensional vector or whatever, take the dot product between that and a set of 10 learned weights, and preload the branch if the result is above some threshold. Even a simple model could perhaps work really well here.&lt;p&gt;Of course it&amp;#x27;s not like they have some deep learning convolutional net running on the program input. I also bet the weights are set at the factory so it&amp;#x27;s not &amp;quot;learning&amp;quot; anything.</text></comment>
<story><title>Neural network spotted deep inside Samsung&apos;s Galaxy S7 silicon brain</title><url>http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/22/samsung_m1_core/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dingo_bat</author><text>This is literally insane. I&amp;#x27;ve never heard of a neural net branch predictor.&lt;p&gt;Edit: my layman knowledge about branch prediction and neural networks is showing its gross inadequacy :&amp;#x2F;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DannyBee</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s actually really common these days.
:)&lt;p&gt;Search google for &amp;quot;hashed perceptron branch predictor&amp;quot;</text></comment>