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Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

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Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#11

Post by bjconlan »

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…

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

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#13

Post by mikewarot »

bjconlan wrote: post #11
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…

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

The Green arrays chips are quite interesting in their own right. The ability to have a grid of CPUs each working at part of a problem could be used in parallelizing a lot of things, including the execution of LLMs.

There are secondary consequences of breaking computation down to a directed acyclic graph of binary logic operations. You can guarantee runtime, as you know a-priori how long each step will take. Splitting up computation to avoid the complications of Amdahl's law should be fairly easy.

I hope to eventually build a small array of Raspberry Pi Pico modules that can emulate a larger array than any one module can handle. Linear scaling is a given.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#15

Post by Bluestein »

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…

> Transmeta

Whatever happened to them ...

They had a somewhat serious go at being "third wheel" back in the early 2000s, mid 1990s?

  PS. Actually considered getting a Crusoe machine back in the day ...

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#16

Post by nailer »

The giant global computers that are Solana mainnet / devnet / testnet. The programs are compiled from Rust into (slightly tweaked) EBPF binaries and state updates every 400ms, using VDFs to sync clocks between the leaders that are allowed to update state.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#18

Post by runjake »

Bluestein wrote: post #15
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…

> Transmeta Whatever happened to them ... They had a somewhat serious go at being "third wheel" back in the early 2000s, mid 1990s? PS. Actually considered getting a Crusoe machine back in the day ...

They released a couple processors with much lower performance than the market expected, shut that down, started licensing their IP to Intel, Nvidia, and others, and then got acquired.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?

#19

Post by mikewarot »

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

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