[Hardware] Re: Assembly Language

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Tue Sep 18 00:10:44 UTC 2007


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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