Corsica : Microsoft's compression and encryption asic

[blue]

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/bl...-acceleration/

An interesting project.

[Jyrki Alakuijala]

Outside of video no compression accelerator 'made it' yet. The flexibility that comes with a software approach tends to give a 5–10% density advantage which has been too much for HW to catch up by bruteforcing. Randen and HighwayHash show that the advantage in encryption may also be equally difficult to realize.

[SolidComp]

Outside of video no compression accelerator 'made it' yet. The flexibility that comes with a software approach tends to give a 5–10% density advantage which has been too much for HW to catch up by bruteforcing. Randen and HighwayHash show that the advantage in encryption may also be equally difficult to realize.

Jyrki what do you mean? Corsica and Zipline "made it". Microsoft and Broadcom designed the ASIC, and Microsoft deployed them at scale at Azure. That's what the article is about.

The ratios are extremely impressive at 4 to 8 percent. I wonder what the Zipline algorithm is specifically.

[Cyan]

I wonder what the Zipline algorithm is specifically.

https://github.com/opencomputeproject/Project-Zipline

See also : https://encode.su/threads/3083-Micro...roject-Zipline

[blue]

Their LZ comressor supports maximum 64KB window size. The search engine is directly byte matching. It should provide a lot benefits comparing to hash chain based searching in software.
Four compression engine with 4BYTE per cycle at 800Mhz frequency, so total 100Gb throughput. Not a very impression data for a specified accelerator.

[Jyrki Alakuijala]

Jyrki what do you mean? Corsica and Zipline "made it".

When the developer itself claims to have deployed a new technology, it is not yet a notable sign of superiority of that technique. In my book it counts as a storytelling effort, a marketing deployment or a feasibility study.