Reservoir computers;
Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?
21–30 of 109 posts
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?
#22they was some interesting funk in the 80s :
Lisp computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine
(these were very hot in 1980s era AI)
connection machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine
(a gorillion monobit processor supercluster)
let us also not forget The Itanic
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?
#23Setun: three-valued ternary logic computer instead of the common binary- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
Not 'weird' but any architecture that doesn't have an 8-bit byte causes questions and discussion.
EG: Texas Instruments DSP chip family for digital signal processing, they're all about deep pipelined FFT computations with floats and doubles, not piddling about with 8-bit ASCII .. there's no hardware level bit operations to speak of, and the smallest addressable memory size is either 32 or 64 bits.
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?
#24HVM using interaction nets as alternative to Turing computation deserves a mention. Google: HigherOrderCompany
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?
#25Here are some architectures that might interest you. Note these are links that lead to rabbit holes. 1. Transmeta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta 2. Cell processor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor) 3. VAX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX (Was unusual for it's time, but many concepts have since been adopted) 4. IBM zArchitecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/Architecture (This stuff is comp…
For those really wanting to dig into z/Architecture: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/module_1678991624569/pdf/SA22-78...>
The Wikipedia link has it as its first reference, but it's honestly worth linking directly here. I highly recommend trying to get someone to give you a TSO/E account and picking up HLASM.
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?
#26BitGrid is my hobby horse. It's a Cartesian grid of cells with 4 bit in, 4 bit out, LUTs (look up tables), latched in alternating phases to eliminate race conditions. It's the response to the observation that most of the transistors in a computer are idle at any given instant . There are a full rabbit hole worth of advantages to this architecture once you really dig into it. Description https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitg…
On reading this I thought "oh someone's doing the Green Arrays thing" but this looks like it pre-dates those CPUs by some time. But as nobody has mentioned it yet surprisingly: https://www.greenarraychips.com/ albeit perhaps not weird; just different
Agreed, they belong on this list. 18-bit Forth computers, available today and intended for real-world use in low-power contexts.
Website: https://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/index.php#arc...
PDF with technical overview of one of their chips: https://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB003-11...
Discussed:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23142322
* https://comp.lang.forth.narkive.com/y7h1mSWz/more-thoughts-o...
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?
#27Motorola used to have a one bit microprocessor, the MC14500B.
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?
#28Here are some architectures that might interest you. Note these are links that lead to rabbit holes. 1. Transmeta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta 2. Cell processor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor) 3. VAX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX (Was unusual for it's time, but many concepts have since been adopted) 4. IBM zArchitecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/Architecture (This stuff is comp…
Why the Cell processor did not had success in AI/DL applications?
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?
#29A lot of things are Turing-complete. The funniest one to me are Powerpoint slides. https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_comple... https://gwern.net/turing-complete
I prefer the x86 MOV instruction:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210214020524/https://stedolan....
Removing all but the mov instruction from future iterations of the x86 architecture would have many advantages: the instruction format would be greatly simplified, the expensive decode unit would become much cheaper, and silicon currently used for complex functional units could be repurposed as even more cache. As long as someone else implements the compiler.
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?
#30The tinker toy computer doesn't even use electricity.