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Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

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Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#61

Post by t312227 »

madflame991 wrote: post #60
t312227 wrote: post #54

hello, great collection of interesting links - kudos to all! :=) idk ... but isn't the "general" architecture of most of our computers "von neumann"!? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture but what i miss from the various lists, is the "transputer"-architecture / ecosystem from INMOS - a concept of heavily networked arrays of small cores from the 1980ties about transputers * https://en.wikipedia.or…

> but isn't the "general" architecture of most of our computers "von neumann"!? That's something I was also curious about and it turns out Arduinos use the Harvard architecture. You might say Arduinos are not really "computers" but after a bit of googling I found an Apple II emulator running on an Arduino and, well, an Apple II is generally accepted to be a computer :)

hello,

if i remember it correctly the main difference of the "harvard"-architecture was: it uses its own data and program/instruction buses ...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_architecture

i think texas instruments 320x0 signal-processors used this architecture ... back in, you guessed it!, the 1980ties.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS320

ah, they use a modified harvard architecture :))

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Harvard_architecture

cheers!

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#63

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

madflame991 wrote: post #60
t312227 wrote: post #54

hello, great collection of interesting links - kudos to all! :=) idk ... but isn't the "general" architecture of most of our computers "von neumann"!? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture but what i miss from the various lists, is the "transputer"-architecture / ecosystem from INMOS - a concept of heavily networked arrays of small cores from the 1980ties about transputers * https://en.wikipedia.or…

> but isn't the "general" architecture of most of our computers "von neumann"!? That's something I was also curious about and it turns out Arduinos use the Harvard architecture. You might say Arduinos are not really "computers" but after a bit of googling I found an Apple II emulator running on an Arduino and, well, an Apple II is generally accepted to be a computer :)

One of the most popular microcontroller series in history, Intel (and others) 8051, used a Harvard architecture.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#65

Post by mass_and_energy »

runjake wrote: post #4

Here 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…

The use of the Cell processor in the PlayStation 3 was an interesting choice by Sony. It was the perfect successor to the PS2's VU0 and VU1s, so if you were a game developer coming from the PS2 space and were well-versed in the concepts of "my programs job is to feed the VUs", you can scale that knowledge up to keep the cores of the Cell working. The trick seems to be in managing synchronization between them all

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#66

Post by mass_and_energy »

crote wrote: post #56
lormayna wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the Cell processor did not had success in AI/DL applications?

It was released a decade and a half too early for that, and at the time it was too weird and awkward to use to stay relevant once CUDA caught on.

This. CUDA handles a lot of overhead that the dev is responsible for on the Cell architecture. Makes you wonder what PS3 games would have looked like with CUDA-style abstraction of the Cell's capabilities

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#68

Post by theideaofcoffee »

drakonka wrote: post #39

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…

I was hoping someone was going to mention Dave Ackley and the MFM. It has really burrowed down into my mind and I start to see applications of it even when I'm not looking out for it. It really is a mindfuck and I wish it was something that was a bit more top of mind for people. I really think it will be useful when computation becomes even more ubiquitous than it is now, how we'll have to think even more about failure, and make it a first class citizen.

Though I think it will be difficult to switch the narrative of better-performance-at-all-costs mindset toward something like this. For almost every application, you'd probably be better off worrying about integrity than raw speed.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#69

Post by prosaic-hacker »

dongecko wrote: post #27

Motorola used to have a one bit microprocessor, the MC14500B.

Breadboard implementation using the MC14500b

Usagi Electric 1-Bit Breadboard Computer P.01 – The MC14500 and 555 Clock Circuit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPA8dHtf_6M&list=PLnw98JPyOb...

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#70

Post by jononor »

mikewarot wrote: post #7

BitGrid 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…

That is quite interesting. Seems quite easy and efficient to implement in an FPGA. Heck, one could make an ASIC for it via TinyTapeout - https://tinytapeout.com/
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