Viewing profile — fentonc

I built a whimsical LLM-driven robot to provide running commentary for my yard: https://www.chrisfenton.com/meet-grasso-the-yard-robot/

I was an architect on the Anton 2 and 3 machines - the systolic arrays that computed pairwise interactions were a significant component of the chips, but there were also an enormou…

I love stuff like this! I have a Kaypro 2/84, which supports a display resolution of 160x100 with colors ranging from green, to 'less green' to black, and I went down a rabbit hole…

I built a more whimsical version of this - my daughter and I basically built a 'junk robot' from a 1980s movie, told it 'you're an independent and free junk robot living in a yard'…

Awesome project! I built a somewhat similar 30-pixel display: https://www.chrisfenton.com/the-pixelweaver/ Mine was entirely mechanical (driven by punch cards and a hand-crank), an…

I think a quad-CPU X-MP is probably the first computer that could have run (not train!) a reasonably impressive LLM if you could magically transport one back in time. It supported …

The Cray PVP line was also doing double precision floating point, and could overlap vector memory operations with math operations. My guess is that you would need a microcontroller…

Fun article! I was one of the architects on Anton 2 and Anton 3 at DESRES.

This is awesome! I recovered the only copy of COS ( http://www.chrisfenton.com/cos-recovery/ ), but we never really had a way to use it.

I took a different approach by just making an FPGA-based multi-core Z80 setup. One core is dedicated to running 'supervisor' CP/NET server, and all of the applications run on CP/NE…

That's awesome sounding - I love how creative people got with mechanical designs before everything went digital.

This was one of my rare projects that was as fun to use as it was to build!

I spend all day writing C++ or Python, and like playing around with Turbo Pascal on a circa-1984 Kaypro 2 as a hobby machine - the projects are certainly smaller, but my edit-compi…

FPGAs are particularly amazing for this sort of project where you would otherwise need a custom ASIC that could never be even remotely economical to build (see my 16-core Z80 lapto…

I am now adding "Silicon Carver" to my resume.

It updates in pretty close to realtime (ie the simulator timestep is extremely close to the actual wall clock time required to compute the next timestep), so “animation” isn’t real…

I'm definitely packing this with me if I ever time travel.

It's . . . not great.

Author here! Most of my projects are kind of like this penny arcade comic ( https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/06/13/the-hippothala... ) - I saw where something was not, and s…

I came pretty close: http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-turbo-entabulator/

But mine was only 1/10-scale! You're correct this isn't really a Cray other than the vaguely rounded shape, but it is still adorable and looks super fun to program.

I built this! It's amazing! It's a 16-core Z80 running at 140 MHz: http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-zedripper-part-1/

Many CPU/SoC systems could be made vastly simpler while maintaining binary compatibility if you're willing to sacrifice performance/area. Anything that's not visible from the ISA l…

Neat - I had never heard of ACE. In my (fairly limited) experience it works fine, although running the cores at 140 MHz (and the network) forgives a lot of sins. I actually wrote m…

I still play around with Turbo Pascal on CP/M a lot for fun - it is a shockingly good development environment (even on a 4 MHz CPU my edit/compile/debug loop is usually <10 seconds…