Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full production • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by Symmetry » Wed, Nov 23, 2011, 1:10 AM UTC

neuraxon77 wrote: post #39

_delirium wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As far as I know, the cores aren't clocked. Instead Chuck designed his own transistors using his own OKAD II VLSI tools to be efficient on the CMOS process node with switching speeds being dictated by the transistor type and interconnect electrical properties, then designed the cores so that they're only switching those transistors when they do actual work.

Ooh, awesome. Clockless computing seems like a really nifty idea, but its difficult. I imagine it might go mainstream when Moore's law finally runs out.

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

#42

Post by Symmetry » Wed, Nov 23, 2011, 1:16 AM UTC

In past Forth threads I've complained the the Forth model for a computer seems just too at odds with how modern CPUs actually work for me to want to learn it. Well, I look at this thing and its like the soft draft of the future slipping underneath the door, whispering that maybe I should learn Forth after all.

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

#43

Post by ww520 » Wed, Nov 23, 2011, 1:22 AM UTC

What are the software stacks that are available on the chip? Forth must be there. Anything else?

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

#44

Post by femto » Wed, Nov 23, 2011, 1:29 AM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #40

femto wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By "FPGA guys" I meant the guys who make FPGAs, not the guys who use them. There is still a pretty strong dividing line between FPGAs and DSP chips.

Sorry for the misinterpretation. If I was an FPGA manufacturer, I'd be trying to buy a company like Green Array and beat the CPU manufacturers to the middle ground. Agree about the current divide, though I think it will weaken and eventually disappear.

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

#45

Post by mung7 » Wed, Nov 23, 2011, 1:35 AM UTC

This is all new to me. Does anyone know if these chips could be used for bitcoin mining?

However, I believe you would have to write completely new programs if it is possible.

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

#46

Post by makmanalp » Wed, Nov 23, 2011, 1:43 AM UTC

ars wrote: post #37

jxcole wrote: post #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?

You would probably want to buy the Evaluation Board which lets you control the machine using USB ports and an ASCII console. 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.

you can do this for about $30: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/budget.html

"suggestion for a complete system"

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

#47

Post by dkersten » Wed, Nov 23, 2011, 2:24 AM UTC

scottyallen wrote: post #7

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…

instruction times as low as 1400 picoseconds

As a random comparison, that's 1.4 nanoseconds per cycle. The PIC24H 16bit PIC microcontroller form Microchip runs at 40MHz, making it 12.5 nanoseconds per cycle. Now, I don't know enough about Chuck Moore's processors and haven't read the docs yet, so I don't know, for example, how many cycle a typical instruction would take, or how much work it takes to synchronise cores, but assuming 1 cycle per instruction, that would make these 144 core $20 processors 8.9 times faster per core. I know its not realistic to assume linear performance speedup from additional cores, but if we do 144 things at once, this makes them 1285 times faster than the PIC24H microcontroller, yet these processors only cost 4 to 6 (depending on amount of RAM) times the cost of a PIC24H microcontroller.

Note that the PIC24H microcontrollers are the more expensive, high performance (but not the highest) model of Microchips 16-bit PIC microcontrollers.

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

#48

Post by calebmpeterson » Wed, Nov 23, 2011, 2:25 AM UTC

VladRussian wrote: post #35

femto wrote: post #22

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…

>We are now to the point where we have almost more gates than we know what to do with, limits of von Neumann architecture (and its underlying mathematics of recursive functions) as a mental framework for our thinking about computing.

You've piqued my curiosity; could you elaborate please?

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

#49

Post by dkersten » Wed, Nov 23, 2011, 2:32 AM UTC

Symmetry wrote: post #42

In past Forth threads I've complained the the Forth model for a computer seems just too at odds with how modern CPUs actually work for me to want to learn it. Well, I look at this thing and its like the soft draft of the future slipping underneath the door, whispering that maybe I should learn Forth after all.

Its worth noting that a number of popular VM's, eg, the JVM, have Forth-like stack-based instruction sets.

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

#50

Post by _sh » Wed, Nov 23, 2011, 2:33 AM UTC

Symmetry wrote: post #42

In past Forth threads I've complained the the Forth model for a computer seems just too at odds with how modern CPUs actually work for me to want to learn it. Well, I look at this thing and its like the soft draft of the future slipping underneath the door, whispering that maybe I should learn Forth after all.

> maybe I should learn Forth after all

http://factorcode.org/

Make it easy on yourself.