I had a chance to visit the Kickfire booth after the keynotes and before the first presentation. They gave me a kicking t-shirt, followed by a presentation on the newly announced Kickfire appliance (now in beta, shipping in Fall 2008). Here are some notes I jotted down:
- von Neumann bottleneck
- SQL chip (SQC), packs the power of 10s of conventional CPUs
- Query parallelization on the chip
- On-chip memory - 64GB. No registers - no von Neumann bottleneck
- Beats the performance of a given 3 server, 32 CPU, 130TB box (1TB of actual data - space is used for distributing IO)
- SQC uses column-store, compression, intelligent indexing
- SQL Chip, PCI connection, plugs into a Linux server
- SQL execution
- Memory management
- Loader acceleration
- KDB (Kickfire storage engine), plugs into MySQL …