Comment by mkoubaa
5 years ago
Given that fact I'm wondering if google ever researched custom chips or instruction sets for marshalling pbs, like the TPUs they worked on for ML.
5 years ago
Given that fact I'm wondering if google ever researched custom chips or instruction sets for marshalling pbs, like the TPUs they worked on for ML.
Problem is once you parse the protobuf, you have to immediately do other computations on it in the same process. No one needs to parse protobufs all day long like an ML model or doing hashes for crypto.
That doesn't seem to preclude hardware assistance. For example they have also explored hardware acceleration for the tcmalloc fast path allocation by adding circuits to general purpose CPUs. Arguably, Intel BMI descends from a request that Google made years ago to speed up protobuf decoding (and other workloads) on x86.