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Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full production

greenarraychips.com

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Re: Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full production

#21
post #20
post #6

May be if you use 100+ of these (~14400 'computers') you can build a machine with emerging behavior, brain-like?

I knew it. The name "Moore" sounded suspicious to me immediately. Now I know his real name is Chuck Testa!!! On a more serious note, what we need much more of is not the processing speed. What we need much more of is what I call "memory processability", which roughly means "how many times per second can you process the whole memory" - or something like that. Basically how much CPU is there per RAM. Indexing is a grea…

That was done in the 80's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine . Richard Feynman had to help the designers with the hard bits.

Users recall them fondly. In the end, clusters became too cheap for custom hardware like this to compete.

Re: Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full production

#22
post #3

Let me get this straight: It's basically a microcontroller timed 144? Can anyone explain to a nonhardware geek?

It's the future, representing a convergence between Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and the microprocessor.

Gate arrays are vast arrays of logic gates, which can be wired together in almost arbitrary patterns by a sea of "fuses", typically controlled by state stored in on-board SRAM. They are real time and blindingly fast due to their massive parallelism, achieving supercomputer type speeds when applied to the right type of problem and programmed well. They are more difficult to program than a microprocessor. One way of looking at an FPGA is as an array of tens of millions of very simple computing engines.

Over the years, the number of transistors on an FPGA has been rocketing up. Generally these transistors have been put to use by providing more and more simple logic blocks. We are now to the point where we have almost more gates than we know what to do with, and the chip is being dominated by interconnects. This has seen a move towards including a limited number of elaborate hard wired blocks, such as CPUs and multipliers, in addition to the array of logic.

The logical evolution is to stop providing more blocks, but make each block more complex as transistor counts go up. Eventually we will see arrays of tens of millions of microprocessors, rather than tens of millions of logic blocks. There will be no distinction between a multicore CPU and FPGA.

It's worth noting that the first Xilinx FPGAs, thirty years ago, provided arrays of around 144 logic blocks, similar to the processor count in this chip. Extrapolate 30 years and we will have an array of 10 million microprocessors.

Re: Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full production

#23
post #4

Love the guy and his passion for its chips, but this 144-computer chip looks like a solution in search of a problem: what is trying to solve? How's the inter-core communication handled? On the other hand, creating weird chips like these, just because you can, is awesome and stimulating a hacker's mind.

Some of the industries greatest advances have began as a solution in search of a problem, such as the microprocessor (which its inventor, Intel, didn't think much of compared with memory chips where the real money was). Most fail of course.

If someone can make many-core, in this form, do something useful that can't be done elsewhere (unlike DSP and GPUs, which are already many-core), it will fundamentally upend computing.

Re: Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full production

#24
post #9

Well if you ever wanted to be 'out there' Chuck's processor would be a great place to start. Chuck Moore invented Forth and has been building machines that can run Forth efficiently for years. Think of it as a Turing machine that can do useful work. He has pushed the edge of computation per watt for years. That being said, I've heard him talk about this chips for years and it is great to see it finally see the light…

CLB = configurable logic blocks

Re: Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full production

#26
post #22
post #3

Let me get this straight: It's basically a microcontroller timed 144? Can anyone explain to a nonhardware geek?

It's the future, representing a convergence between Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and the microprocessor. Gate arrays are vast arrays of logic gates, which can be wired together in almost arbitrary patterns by a sea of "fuses", typically controlled by state stored in on-board SRAM. They are real time and blindingly fast due to their massive parallelism, achieving supercomputer type speeds when applied to the…

Correction: I've been lax in my terminology with logic gates and cells. Current big FPGAs contain around 2 million "logic cells", which typically represent between 1 and 10 logic gates each, depending on device programming.

Re: Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full production

#27

Not being much of a hardware geek, I'm having a hard time evaluating how fast each core is. From the site: "With instruction times as low as 1400 picoseconds and consuming as little as 7 picojoules of energy, each of the 144 computers can do its work with unprecedented speed for a microcontroller and yet at unprecedentedly low energy cost, transitioning between running and suspended states in gate delay times. When s…

If 1400 picoseconds is the time it takes for a clock cycle (and therefore the minimum instruction time for 1-cycle instructions), that'd be about 700 MHz, which actually seems pretty high compared to what I would've guessed.

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Re: Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full production

#28
post #22
post #3

Let me get this straight: It's basically a microcontroller timed 144? Can anyone explain to a nonhardware geek?

It's the future, representing a convergence between Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and the microprocessor. Gate arrays are vast arrays of logic gates, which can be wired together in almost arbitrary patterns by a sea of "fuses", typically controlled by state stored in on-board SRAM. They are real time and blindingly fast due to their massive parallelism, achieving supercomputer type speeds when applied to the…

Unfortunately for the FPGA guys, it seems like in general the closer they get to CPUs the less compelling their product becomes.

Re: Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full production

#29
I think this sounds ridiculously cool and at $20 I could probably afford to play around with it. But I have no knowledge of hardware, just programming. To me chips just look like thin green rectangular prisms. How would I get it to actually, you know, do stuff?

Re: Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full production

#30
post #18
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a rough look on it's instruction set and didn't see anything resembling DSP instructions. So i'm not sure it would be great for all those uses. On the other hand, picochip sells a 200-300 core DSP , that is being used for the wireless industry.

From this PDF http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB001-100... GreenArrays seems to think it would support DSP "SUITABILITY: The GA144 is designed to support the largest and most demanding computing challenges that can be addressed with a modest sized die in a relatively inexpensive and easy to use package while still using well less than 650 mW in most practical applications. The geometry allows for g…

There is a huge difference between supporting DSP and being good at DSP. My $0.50 MSP430, clocked at 32kHz, "supports" DSP.
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