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Programming a 144-computer Chip to Minimize Power (2013)

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Re: Programming a 144-computer Chip to Minimize Power (2013)

#11

Post by barbegal »

gaze wrote: post #3

I really love greenarrays and that entire social circle. It's an older group of folks that bought a historical house in Wyoming and do chip design, programming, everything with their own home-brew minimal set of software. It's an alternative universe of programming. It's almost a software and hardware design religion. I think everyone should know about it and that it's possible to work this way, even if you wouldn't…

Has anyone used the greenarray technology for any real world applications? It seems to fit somewhere between an FPGA and a microcontroller, but it doesn't seem that obvious to me what the benefits are, maybe less power than a microcontroller but I can't find any clear cut evidence that is the case for a real world application.

Re: Programming a 144-computer Chip to Minimize Power (2013)

#12

Post by [deleted] »

barbegal wrote: post #11
gaze wrote: post #3

I really love greenarrays and that entire social circle. It's an older group of folks that bought a historical house in Wyoming and do chip design, programming, everything with their own home-brew minimal set of software. It's an alternative universe of programming. It's almost a software and hardware design religion. I think everyone should know about it and that it's possible to work this way, even if you wouldn't…

Has anyone used the greenarray technology for any real world applications? It seems to fit somewhere between an FPGA and a microcontroller, but it doesn't seem that obvious to me what the benefits are, maybe less power than a microcontroller but I can't find any clear cut evidence that is the case for a real world application.

[deleted]

Re: Programming a 144-computer Chip to Minimize Power (2013)

#13

Post by gautamcgoel »

mastax wrote: post #10

Reminds me a lot of the Parallax Propeller: many simple cores optimized for bit-banging I/O and programmable logic. Of course this is much lower power and has many more cores. I think that many core architectures can actually be simpler to program in an embedded context than the traditional single core systems. It's akin to a hardware implementation of the actor model rather than an interrupt state machine or interru…

I bought a propeller 1 as a teenager but never really did much with it... I recall that the propeller 2 is coming out soon, so perhaps it's time to jump back in!

Re: Programming a 144-computer Chip to Minimize Power (2013)

#14

Post by tachyonbeam »

I saw this talk live at Strange Loop 2013, and I'm going to be a contrarian: I wasn't impressed. I don't mean to bash Chuck Moore. Forth is cool, and this chip looks neat, but my impression is that this is a solution looking for a problem. Chuck Moore is having a lot of fun working on it, but he fails to convey why this is useful.

The impression that I had is that the whole talk was Chuck Moore going "look at all the cool assembler tricks I can do!". At no point did he ever demonstrate how his chip could be used to solve anything resembling a real-world use case. Instead, what he demonstrated was that his architecture was very esoteric and impractical to use. Some time could have been spent explaining how this chip can do some common computation (matrix multiplication, image processing, anything) more efficiently than an ARM chip or something we're already familiar with.

He didn't really provide any benchmarks of anything, be it performance or power consumption, and my understanding was that, at the time the talk was given, based on the Q&A session, that he had no customers buying said chips (I wonder why?).

Re: Programming a 144-computer Chip to Minimize Power (2013)

#16

Post by fogus »

gaze wrote: post #8
fogus wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think everyone should know about it I would love to! Any further links to the life/work-style of said group?

I think it's more or less a continuation/extension of the ideas of FORTH. You should read their app notes and read the writing of Chuck Moore, Greg Bailey, Jeff Fox, Charley Shattuck, and other FORTH people to understand the ideas. I've also found very friendly to talk to over the phone.

From your original comment I got the impression that there was a Forth collective somewhere on a commune in Wyoming. I was VERY interested in that but will settle for the wisdom of the Forth luminaries.

Re: Programming a 144-computer Chip to Minimize Power (2013)

#17

Post by fortran77 »

mastax wrote: post #10

Reminds me a lot of the Parallax Propeller: many simple cores optimized for bit-banging I/O and programmable logic. Of course this is much lower power and has many more cores. I think that many core architectures can actually be simpler to program in an embedded context than the traditional single core systems. It's akin to a hardware implementation of the actor model rather than an interrupt state machine or interru…

The DEFCON 22 badge was done on a Propeller. I did a little pokeing around on it--very interesting architecture. But they don't all run at once.... It's just a way to switch contexts instantly.

Re: Programming a 144-computer Chip to Minimize Power (2013)

#18

Post by amock »

gautamcgoel wrote: post #13
mastax wrote: post #10

Reminds me a lot of the Parallax Propeller: many simple cores optimized for bit-banging I/O and programmable logic. Of course this is much lower power and has many more cores. I think that many core architectures can actually be simpler to program in an embedded context than the traditional single core systems. It's akin to a hardware implementation of the actor model rather than an interrupt state machine or interru…

I bought a propeller 1 as a teenager but never really did much with it... I recall that the propeller 2 is coming out soon, so perhaps it's time to jump back in!

While it isn't ready for full production volumes you can purchase a Propeller 2 evaluation board right now.

Re: Programming a 144-computer Chip to Minimize Power (2013)

#20

Post by kleer001 »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #14

I saw this talk live at Strange Loop 2013, and I'm going to be a contrarian: I wasn't impressed. I don't mean to bash Chuck Moore. Forth is cool, and this chip looks neat, but my impression is that this is a solution looking for a problem. Chuck Moore is having a lot of fun working on it, but he fails to convey why this is useful. The impression that I had is that the whole talk was Chuck Moore going "look at all the…

> this is a solution looking for a problem

Sounds like a bit of art to enjoy for its self.

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