New chip with four 400 MIPS cores!
XMOS, founded by David May who designed the Inmos Transputer 25 years ago, has developed a four core chip with each core delivering 400 MIPS. Each core also has 64 I/Os. Volume cost will be $10 each.
http://www.xmos.com/
I was one of the first Transputer developers, I might be able to get some samples out of them.
Leon
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
Post Edited (Leon) : 4/15/2008 10:47:06 AM GMT
http://www.xmos.com/
I was one of the first Transputer developers, I might be able to get some samples out of them.
Leon
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
Post Edited (Leon) : 4/15/2008 10:47:06 AM GMT
Comments
Mike
Post Edited (Ale) : 4/15/2008 11:01:43 AM GMT
It looks like it would be all right but it only has 8 registers per thread. Now if you have 8 threads than the MIPS/thread is 400/8=50 which is about a third or what the propII should do.
And it has too many pins and they can only do 4mA. The prop can do 10x that.
Enough bashing it. Some nice things about it
-Three operand 16 bit instructions. Nice and compact.
-40 32bit timers. PropII will probably only have 32 :-(
-Can fetch 2 16bit instruction / cycle
-Buffered input and output
-XLink looks interesting. Especially off-chip option
Just a thought. Wonder how hard it would be to make the PropII into an emulator for this using a LMM?
Do this only betwen neighboring COGS, matrix fashion, but allow cogs on the edge of the matrix to either drive the serial links out to I/O pins or connect back round to COGS on the opposite edge of the matrix.
Adapt the existing serial shifters in the video logic of each COG to optioanlly do serial links.
Then get ImageCraft to produce a parallel C compiler[noparse]:)[/noparse]
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
For me, the past is not over yet.
Possibly, but the instruction decoding looks complicated and there seems there would be a lot of complexity in handling the I/O types and XLink.
The XS1-G does serve a purpose in highlighting the simplicity of design and consequential ease of use of the Propeller in comparison. I think I'll take the easy option
But we do have the philosophy of regularity, all COGs should be equal. So it make a good argument that the video shifters should be enhanced a little for communication purposes, shift in, shift out possibly some NRZ/NRZI encoding etc. Then a few extra traces on the chip and gates to direct links to neighboring COGS or I/O pins.
Given 16 cogs, imagine them as a 4 by 4 array. Links go/left right up/down. Top row would loop to botom row and left column loops to right column thus keeping to the regularity rule.
Save COG zero which would boot up from a link on an I/O pin. In fact maybe like the transputer all COGS should boot from a link in this way all cogs could be started with PASM code with no need to access HUB RAM.
If I remember the transputer would listen to all of it's links on start up and boot from which ever recieved code first.
This would make all COGS more equal.
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
For me, the past is not over yet.
If you want a 4x4 array than look at the seaForth or the tile64 (or something like that). The problem with an array is that it becomes hard to share a large amount of memory.
But now we need extra shifters to receive data. Or do we ? If all the shifters used for communication were running in synch then they could shift input data in one end whilst shifting output data out the other. So a 31 bit shifter could simultaneously send and receive 32 bit words.
It's nice to ponder all these possibilities but Prop II is up to Chip and I'm feel sure he has some surprises for us.
As for seaForth and tile64, may be one day I'll have the opportunity to lok into it but I've just invested a lot of time in getting up to speed with the Prop and I love it.
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
For me, the past is not over yet.
8 longs every 16 clock cycles would be faster than a serial port running at the clock speed anyway and have a lower latency.
As mentioned above though one of the really important thing about the propeller is that it is
1. relatively simple to understand and program
2. easy to interface with. Sure, the other chips may have more raw power, but try to hook a led up to one on a breadboard.
I find the video h/w useful to talk to e.g. external memory (like the Hydra SRAM card).
Like Locks, it would be possible to have N internal shared FIFO's and any Cog can wait on/write to any FIFO, any Cog can wait on/read from any FIFO, N => number of Cogs makes sense. That would be flexible in allowing limited tiling or single Cog's with multiple links in/out as design requires. It's beauty is it's easy to see/explain how it works. FIFO could be as little as 1-deep. Chip may argue that via-Hub block-transfers are just as useful, more flexible, the counter argument is 'waitfifo' is simpler and easy to use with less code.
Waitvid can be used as an enhanced SPI output, and all that's lacking is the equivalent to read a video stream.
I think we're talking Propeller Mk III here, but we don't knows what magic Chip is going to include in Mk II.
White space indentation is a pain, skip a few spaces or a tab and all hell brakes loose. So many times I've sworn at cut and paste dong that.
More seriously the Occam language to which you refer whilst being truely wonderfull just was not C. Same debate we have about spin and the propeller. Although parallel C for the Transputer did turn up from third parties.
As for why it did not take off. Well the T8000 launch in London that I attended totaly lacked the pizzaz of the Intel launch of the 860 chip about the same time. Nobody quite knew what the transputer was for, I think, and the marketing did ot tell you. Perceptioned seemed to be it was aimed at highly parallel super computer stuff so embedded engineers did not look into it.
Strangely enough though at that Intel 860 launch exhibition/conference many of the exhibitors showing off products using the 860 for floating point number crunching speed were also using transputes for the interconnects !
I nearly got the transputer into one design that needed three seperate processors for security reasons. It was a perfect fit except for the power consumption. That finally went with thee Intel 8088s.
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
For me, the past is not over yet.
Leon
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
-phar
The propeller is here and now complete with a free development environment. For a few euros I can get a Prop chip in my hand from a local supplier and half an hour later it's up and running with almost no support circuitry required. All technical info is available.
If XMOS and the like would provide a 100€ protoboard and free compiler I'd be on them like a shot. I imagine that is not going to happen any time soon as they want serious volume with big customer "partners". They have to get back that 16M venture capital which is a lot of chips and a lot of expensive development tools.
I would love too see compainies like XMOS have an eye on us hobbyists, students an other small guys. I'd also like to see Parallax making it up to the industrial volume market.
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
For me, the past is not over yet.
··But I'm wondering if they sold enough Hydras to make a Hydra II a possibility?
-phar
I would think that if there was a Hydra II, it would use a PropII. I don't think the retro game programming hobbiest market can afford the Tile64 also. As discussed elsewhere, the PropII w/64 io's will have enough pins to add external memory, not a real memory bus, but certainly better than the Extreme512 card can do, and enough for a frame buffer.
If you have seen what baggers has been able to do with the current propeller on his PropGFX light, it will be truely amazing on 8 times the processing power and enough memory!
I could not agree more with heater. I used to play with the HC11 back when it just came out, but since then, I had moved on to bigger computers. It was quite refreshing to see that you could just wire things up like I used to do, but with a current chip. When my wife had gotten me "What's a Microcontroller" kit for Christmas 2006, I was rehooked! It really was a refreshing experience, and then my propeller demo board really topped that. You have to hand it to parallax for their educational approach to microcontrollers/computers. It may not be as profitable as selling tens of millions of ARMs or AVRs, but from what I have learned about Chip, it is more about passion than profit. Kudos to parallax!
Doug
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Don't visit my new website...
Look here: http://cgi.ebay.com/3-Rare-Vintage-Inmos-Transputer-NOS_W0QQitemZ220223319130QQihZ012QQcategoryZ4193QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
/Tripp