Squeak History / Tiny Machines

Andrew Berg andrew_c_berg at yahoo.com
Wed Mar 19 01:44:36 UTC 2003


On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 16:08:11 -0800, Tim Rowledge <tim at sumeru.stanford.edu> 
wrote:

> Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at squeakland.org> wrote:
>>
>> The Sony PSII and PSIII are much more interesting *and* they allow 
>> microcoding in many important places.
>>
> What was it they said in an article a few weeks ago? something like 73
> processors in a 1-8-64 tree. Sounds fun. Assuming they actually let out
> the development tools of course. The problem with XBox et al is the fee
> to get into the kitchen and then having to get a signature so you can
> distribute. If anyone knows of a way to help short circuit this, do let
> me know since I have some ideas on making use of XBox/PS2 etc. Modchips
> are not really an answer here.

Well, there is the 'Linux for PlayStation 2' project:  http://playstation2- 
linux.com/ which is an actual Sony kit to add a monitor adapter, internal 
HD, NIC, and USB keyboard & mouse to a PS/2.  It looks nifty, and if I had 
the $199 + whatever-a-PS/2-costs-these-days to spend on yet-another- 
computer-that-I-won't-have-time-to-play-with, I'd buy one.  It seems like 
it should make a heckuva nice Squeak/Croquet platform.

>
>> Well, IIRC, the first ARM that Tim did so many neat things with was only 
>> about 25,000 transistors (and the Alto was a lot less than that).
> That's right; we used to joke "25,000 transistors and no Gates" :-)
>
> tim

Most of the transistors that Intel (and friends) burn through seem to be 
spent on cache and superscalar execution complexity.  Building a whole 
bunch of simple pipelined cores into a chip seems better.  I s'pose that 
we'd have to make Squeak multithreaded then, tho.

-andrew

-- 
andrew_c_berg at yahoo.com




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