31–40 of 100 posts
May be if you use 100+ of these (~14400 'computers') you can build a machine with emerging behavior, brain-like?
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.
http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/WP002-100...
I think the only thing Chuck is missing is a few 20-somethings hackers, bent on solving an 'impossible' problem with his chips.
That's why I'm posting it here. Some possible ideas ==================== - Sound processing (think 144 cores preforming Fourier Transforms) - Pico Satellites (This chip has a surprisingly extreme low power requirement). - Wireless communication (small power requirement means small batteries) - Computer Vision processing. Imagine toys or tools that can process visual information faster than an Xbox. - Basically anythi…
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…
limits of von Neumann architecture (and its underlying mathematics of recursive functions) as a mental framework for our thinking about computing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If anything defines an "FPGA guy" is choice of language. Historically FPGAs have been programmed with an HDL, such as VHDL or Verilog, because these languages are concurrent meaning they handle parallel systems.
My prediction is that as mainstream multicore CPUs develop we will see the rise of concurrent versions of mainstream languages, which will supplant HDLs. Just as DSP's are now programmed in (almost) vanilla C/C++/..., we will see FPGAs being programmed using the same languages as micros and DSPs. It will then be possible to write code and (almost) seamlessly run it on any platform, depending on how fast it needs to run.
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?
The thing is, it's just a computer. The real value of this is hooking it to hardware to actually do something. So I suggest starting here instead: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/budget.html and learning how to work with hardware as well.
I think the only thing Chuck is missing is a few 20-somethings hackers, bent on solving an 'impossible' problem with his chips.
That's why I'm posting it here. Some possible ideas ==================== - Sound processing (think 144 cores preforming Fourier Transforms) - Pico Satellites (This chip has a surprisingly extreme low power requirement). - Wireless communication (small power requirement means small batteries) - Computer Vision processing. Imagine toys or tools that can process visual information faster than an Xbox. - Basically anythi…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately for the FPGA guys, it seems like in general the closer they get to CPUs the less compelling their product becomes.
I hesitate to divide the world into "FPGA guys" and "non-FPGA guys". It's a continuum of computing power; CPU DSP FPGA, and one moves up and down it as the task varies and technology changes. If anything defines an "FPGA guy" is choice of language. Historically FPGAs have been programmed with an HDL, such as VHDL or Verilog, because these languages are concurrent meaning they handle parallel systems. My prediction is…