CC'ed to the hardware list
On Sat, Sep 15, 2007 at 02:26:47PM -0700, Peter William Lount wrote:
Each of the Tile 64 Processors is thousands of more times more powerful than that old 6502 based Apple ][ system. I can imagine what Gemstone Warrior would be like on it! Fully object oriented, fully message oriented, fully 4-D (3D+Time)!
If you really want a chip to play with as a hobby with potential for future success play with the Tile 64 chip!
Smalltalk on the Tile 64 chip will be hot! When will it happen?
Jecel Assumpcao Jr. is working on a quite similar project. He is putting Neo Smalltalk [1] on a 9-core Plurion [2] processor. He has said he will follow this up with a port of Spoon. More information can be found on his hardware Swiki [3].
I'll be working with him on this project as part of my graduate studies.
[1]. Neo Smalltalk: http://www.merlintec.com:8080/software http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5637
[2]. A very out-of-date description of Plurion architecture: http://www.merlintec.com/download/plurion.pdf
A description of the actual processor being used: http://www.merlintec.com:8080/hardware/32
[3]. Jecel's hardware Swiki: http://www.merlintec.com:8080/hardware
Matthew Fulmer wrote on Sat, 15 Sep 2007 15:03:52 -0700
On Sat, Sep 15, 2007 at 02:26:47PM -0700, Peter William Lount wrote:
Each of the Tile 64 Processors is thousands of more times more powerful than that old 6502 based Apple ][ system. I can imagine what Gemstone Warrior would be like on it! Fully object oriented, fully message oriented, fully 4-D (3D+Time)!
If you really want a chip to play with as a hobby with potential for future success play with the Tile 64 chip!
Smalltalk on the Tile 64 chip will be hot! When will it happen?
Note that this is a pretty expensive chip (around $500 in large quantities). There are some cheaper (but with memory limitations that might make them hard to use for Smalltalk) processor arrays:
http://www.intellasys.net/ http://www.parallax.com/propeller/index.asp
Some more expensive alternatives:
http://www.streamprocessors.com/ http://www.cradle.com/ http://www.stretchinc.com/
Here are some FPGA-like processor arrays pretty much in the spirit of RAW (the MIT project where the Tile 64 comes from):
http://www.ambric.com/ http://www.mathstar.com/ http://www.brightscale.com/ http://www.picochip.com/
Jecel Assumpcao Jr. is working on a quite similar project. He is putting Neo Smalltalk [1] on a 9-core Plurion [2] processor. He has said he will follow this up with a port of Spoon. More information can be found on his hardware Swiki [3].
I'll be working with him on this project as part of my graduate studies.
As soon as I finish a text I am writing (plan for master's thesis work - has nifty things like compiling Smalltalk into hardware objects. Sadly, it is in Portuguese), I will start working on this implementation. The idea is to make this development as open as possible, with a public version control system, a bug tracker and a blog. This would be a good thing to implement in Seaside but perhaps I should start out with existing solutions to get results faster?
It would be interesting if people could look at the (extremely bare, sorry) description of the instruction set (Matthew gave the link in his email, but here it is again - http://www.merlintec.com:8080/hardware/32) and give their opinions. This is a RISC design, not a bytecoded stack machine like I had previously been doing. The idea here is to play nice with the C world (very important for Squeak, not as much for my own Smalltalk) while still being a good learning experience for someone digging deeper and deeper (starting with eToys, for example, then Smalltalk-80 code, then meta stuff and so on) until they get to the hardware level.
If I can get 9 cores running at 240MHz on my ML401 development board then we will have a very reasonable view of what future Smalltalk computers will be like.
-- Jecel
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