The five nanometer process node is here: on April 15, Samsung announced that its 5nm FinFET process technology – based on extreme ultraviolet lithography – is complete in its development and is now ready for customers’ samples. Compared to 7nm, the new process provides up to a 25 percent increase in logic area efficiency with 20 percent lower power consumption or 10 percent higher performance, still allowing reuse of all the 7nm intellectual property.

Object-based data compression

But advancing electronics is not just about scaling down to the next process node; research shows that many important aspects of data processing offer significant optimization opoortunities. Among them is data compression, aimed at reducing the frequency and amount of data fetched from main memory. In a paper presented at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems this week, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology describe the first approach to compress ‘objects’ across the memory hierarchy, matching the characteristics of object-oriented programming. As MIT explained in a news release, traditional compression techniques operate on fixed-size chunks of data, and therefore handle objects poorly. The researchers overcame this limitation through their prior work that reorganizes the memory architecture to directly manipulate objects, as opposed to traditional cache-based structures. The new technique uncovers more compression opportunities as it leverages redundancy across objects, while the traditional ones were limited to finding redundancy within each fixed-size block. In experiments using a modified Java virtual machine, the new technique compressed twice as much data and reduced memory usage by half over traditional cache-based methods.
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