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Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

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Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#31

Post by trealira »

jasomill wrote: post #29
yen223 wrote: post #14

A 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 a…

> As long as someone else implements the compiler.

A C compiler exists already, based on LCC, and it's called the movfuscator.

https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#33

Post by mikewarot »

mikewarot wrote: post #19

I thought magnetic logic was an interesting technology when I first heard of it. It's never going to replace semiconductors, but if you want to compute on the surface of Venus. You just might be able to make it work there. The basic limit is the curie point of the cores, and the source of clock drive signals. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_logic

Vacuum tubes would be the perfect thing to generate the clock pulses, as they can be made to withstand the temperatures, vibrations, etc. I'm thinking a nuclear reactor to provide heat via thermopiles might be the way to power it.

However... it's unclear how thermally conductive the "atmosphere" there is, it might make heat engines unworkable, no matter how powerful.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#35

Post by RecycledEle »

Using piloted pneumatic valves as logic gates blew my mind.

If you are looking for strangeness, the 1990's to early 2000's microcontrollers had I/O ports, but every single I/O port was different. None of them had a standard so that we could (for example) plug in a 10-pin header and connect the same peripheral to any of the I/O ports on a single microcontroller, much less any microcontroller they made in a family of microcontrollers.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#38

Post by dann0 »

mikewarot wrote: post #33
mikewarot wrote: post #19

I thought magnetic logic was an interesting technology when I first heard of it. It's never going to replace semiconductors, but if you want to compute on the surface of Venus. You just might be able to make it work there. The basic limit is the curie point of the cores, and the source of clock drive signals. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_logic

Vacuum tubes would be the perfect thing to generate the clock pulses, as they can be made to withstand the temperatures, vibrations, etc. I'm thinking a nuclear reactor to provide heat via thermopiles might be the way to power it. However... it's unclear how thermally conductive the "atmosphere" there is, it might make heat engines unworkable, no matter how powerful.

The AMULET Project was an asynchronous version of ARM microprocessors. Maybe one could design away the clock like with these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_(processor)

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#39

Post by drakonka »

This reminds me of a talk I went to at the 2020 ALIFE conference, in which the speaker presented an infinitely-scalable architecture called the "Movable Feast Machine". He suggested relinquishing hardware determinism - the hardware can give us wrong answers and the software has to recover, and in some cases the hardware may fail catastrophically. The hardware is a series of tiles with no CPU. Operations are local and best-effort, determinism not guaranteed. The software then has to reconcile that.

It was quite a while ago and my memory is hazy tbh, but I put some quick notes here at the time: https://liza.io/alife-2020-soft-alife-with-splat-and-ulam/

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#40

Post by mikewarot »

dann0 wrote: post #38
mikewarot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vacuum tubes would be the perfect thing to generate the clock pulses, as they can be made to withstand the temperatures, vibrations, etc. I'm thinking a nuclear reactor to provide heat via thermopiles might be the way to power it. However... it's unclear how thermally conductive the "atmosphere" there is, it might make heat engines unworkable, no matter how powerful.

The AMULET Project was an asynchronous version of ARM microprocessors. Maybe one could design away the clock like with these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_(processor)

In the case of magnetic logic, the multi-phase clock IS the power supply. Vacuum tubes are quite capable of operating for years in space, if properly designed. I assume the same could be done for the elevated pressures and temperatures on the surface of Venus. As long as you can keep the cathode significantly hotter than the anode, to drive thermionic emission in the right direction, that is.
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