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Greetings from Greg Bailey in Cheyenne, Wyoming where GreenArrays can say, paraphrasing Steve McQueen at the end of the superb movie Papillon, "We're still here, you Bastards!!!" As an experiment, I will be happy to address any question that anyone might have, including those appearing in this thread, at the GreenArrays shop and lecture hall in Second Life. I propose to stand there, virtually, at 0800 PDT / 1500 UTC…
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…
It has logic to multiplex all those I/O to GPIO pins, and sometimes you have to choose between a second USB controller and a third UART.
Because all this gates eat a lot of current, it has a lot of logic to power off parts of the core.
In a way, popular ARM SoCs are a lot like bloated software.
I think the GA144 can replace a lot of this, without all the hardwired logic, with less gates, less power, less heat dissipation, and probably less pins.
Regarding his way of presenting it: I did cringe at times a little too. But at least he doesn't present it as silver bullet than can do anything easily with a C compiler and a Web programmer. Clearly his chip is as an oddball as his creator, so it requires some commitment.
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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.
That’s not what the datasheet says. It says: ”... its eight processors, called cogs, that can perform simultaneous tasks independently or cooperatively...” ” True parallel processing with eight symmetric 32-bit processors (cogs) in one microcontroller” ”20 MIPS per cog, 160 MIPS total with all cogs running” ”All eight cogs are driven from the System Clock; they each maintain the same time reference and all active cog…
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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.
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They're making their second-generation chip right now, and I think there are a bunch of problems that this chip is an obvious solution for. Chuck Moore is bad at presentations to outside audiences. This should surprise no one familiar with the man. This doesn't make the tech less useful, though.
Are they? You mean a generation following the GA144? That sounds really interesting! I see tantalizing tidbits on http://www.greenarraychips.com/ : "Latest developments: As of early 2020, shipments of the EVB002 evaluation kit and of G144A12 chips continue. Work continues on improvement of the arrayForth 3 integrated development system. Design of a new chip, G144A2x, continues; this will be upward compatible with the…
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They're making their second-generation chip right now, and I think there are a bunch of problems that this chip is an obvious solution for. Chuck Moore is bad at presentations to outside audiences. This should surprise no one familiar with the man. This doesn't make the tech less useful, though.
> [...] I think there are a bunch of problems that this chip is an obvious solution for If those were really obvious, tachyonbeam wouldn't have to ask ;-) In your opinion, what are problems for which this chip would be a solution?
The most obvious one is AI. These things are incredibly parallel & entirely self-contained, and a consumer desktop PSU could power countless amounts of them without a second thought. At $2,000 for 100 chips ($20/chip), you can start to do some really interesting stuff for the cost of a consumer laptop.
It's natural that AI is a problem this chip excels at, given Moore studied under McCarthy and all.
If you feel morally okay with playing with proprietary software, I really recommend playing a little bit with the simulator of the chip. Given what's intuitive with one or two, you'll probably be able to see the possibilities much better after an hour or so of play.
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They're making their second-generation chip right now, and I think there are a bunch of problems that this chip is an obvious solution for. Chuck Moore is bad at presentations to outside audiences. This should surprise no one familiar with the man. This doesn't make the tech less useful, though.
Which problems for those of us who don't find it obvious? I'm a big fan of Chuck and Forth in general, but I don't do any embedded work since college, so I don't have much personal use for this kind of system that I can think of.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157949
AI is just the most obvious usage, though.
It'd be unimaginative to just consider embedded uses: there are terribly practical uses for it. Consider that most big companies buy hardware based on performance per watt, then consider that GA144 blows most things out of the water on that front.
GA also has a few recommendations (ripped from their site):
APPLICATIONS
Energy harvesting applications
Portable devices
Remote sensing and data reduction
Ideal for parallel and/or pipelined work
Image processing
Complex control systems
Cryptography
High speed signal processing
Simulation and synthesis
Inexpensive, massively parallel systems for research and education
Artificial intelligence, neural netsEarlier quoted context omitted.
They're making their second-generation chip right now, and I think there are a bunch of problems that this chip is an obvious solution for. Chuck Moore is bad at presentations to outside audiences. This should surprise no one familiar with the man. This doesn't make the tech less useful, though.
Has there been any concrete information released about their second-generation chip? The GreenArrays website only contains a few vague hints, suggesting, for example, that it might have a 32-bit datapath.
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> [...] I think there are a bunch of problems that this chip is an obvious solution for If those were really obvious, tachyonbeam wouldn't have to ask ;-) In your opinion, what are problems for which this chip would be a solution?
'tachyonbeam didn't ask. The most obvious one is AI. These things are incredibly parallel & entirely self-contained, and a consumer desktop PSU could power countless amounts of them without a second thought. At $2,000 for 100 chips ($20/chip), you can start to do some really interesting stuff for the cost of a consumer laptop. It's natural that AI is a problem this chip excels at, given Moore studied under McCarthy a…
I seriously doubt that. The cores on that chip are extremely memory-limited: 72 bytes per core, that's about 10 kiB per Chip! And if you want to access SDRAM, you need an external SDRAM controller and bit-bang it. Gee, I wonder what that does to throughput and latency...
This chip's competition isn't GPUs and AI engines, but very low-cost, low-performance FPGAs, and it would probably lose. Given the extremely constrained environment of the individual cores (no cache, extremely little memory, a stack-based architecture), FPGAs are probably even easier to program.
There are no commercial applications, it's a toy.
Greetings from Greg Bailey in Cheyenne, Wyoming where GreenArrays can say, paraphrasing Steve McQueen at the end of the superb movie Papillon, "We're still here, you Bastards!!!" As an experiment, I will be happy to address any question that anyone might have, including those appearing in this thread, at the GreenArrays shop and lecture hall in Second Life. I propose to stand there, virtually, at 0800 PDT / 1500 UTC…