Why so few garage processors? (was Re: Squeak History / TinyMachines)

Donald MacQueen dmacq at erols.com
Thu Mar 20 11:54:27 UTC 2003


Torsten,

a very interesting discussion, but what is an fpga?

Thursday, March 20, 2003, 5:49:45 AM, you wrote:

> You should find out first, if building a whole new processor is necessary
> and viable. I have collected quite a number of articles about OO
> processors including the Xerox machines, Recursive(both SuperCISC) and
> SOAR(RISC). There are also some Java processors around. It seems that the
> difficult problems are OO storage and method finding whereas the actual
> bytecode-interpreter is a bit more simple. My personal interest faded when
> I realized how much work it would be and when I read an article by David
> Ungar "Is Hardware Support for OO Languages really necessary". He says no
> and he was one of th main designers of SOAR. Language requirements change
> and processors are rather static which might lead to dead ends as CS goes
> on.

> It seems much more viable to use an existing processor and a FPGA for
> peripheral support. There exists such a design at the Technical University
> in Berlin and I'm triyng to get my hands on such a board. It uses an ARM,
> has 32 MB SDRAM and an FPGA for some other stuff. Material costs are about
> 100EUR. Also the DEC Itsy looks promising as a base design. If you havcan
> spend some money have a look at "Fred" at
> http://www.kws-computer.de/kwscom/pro86E.html

> In my opinion it might be interesting to have two memory buses. One very
> fast (at processor rate) running the VM and a slower for the image. There
> is an inherent bandwidth preservation in bytecoded languages.

> Torsten Sadowski

> P.S. The last interim Dynabook was the Newton. Pity it died.

> On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Hannes Hirzel wrote:

>> Tim Rowledge <tim at sumeru.stanford.edu> wrote:
>> > Gimme money.
>> >
>> > There are several of us reasonably qualified to do something like this
>> > but where is the money going to come from? It's a sizable project that
>> > would involve a number of people that would need enough income to
>> > survive the experience; sorry but I'm not in a position to subsidize any
>> > of this.
>> >
>> > Once it existed what could we do with it to recoup the costs?  Competing
>> > against Intel/Motorola/whoever is not a game for fun - unless you can
>> > pay for said fun.
>> >
>> > tim
>> > --
>> > Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
>> > Useful random insult:- One pearl short of a necklace.
>>
>> As I understand Ned  - his baseline argument is that such a project
>> nowadays should be relatively easy to do with standard FPGA parts
>> and stuff. It is not about competing. It is just about trying out
>> old new ways of doing things and having great fun.
>> Just to see what happens. Sharing the x-perience of achievieng
>> something what people normally consider to be hard.
>>
>> If it isn't fun and easy to do we shoudn't do it.
>>
>> And perhaps there is a hardware champion out there would
>> assemble a few boards for the more software oriented types
>> to play with. Just a PC board with an ethernet connection
>> and a facility to program the FPGA.
>>
>> -- Hannes
>>
>>
>>



-- 
Donald                           

Donald M. MacQueen [|]
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
- Edmund Burke



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