Every now and then I think about returning to old Blighty. But then I remember that feeling I had in the nineties - that the north sea oil would run out, manufacturing would cease, Margaret Thatchers "service economy", by which I imagine she meant her friends in the banks, insurance and finance sector, would gradually drift away to where the real wealth is (HSBC anyone) and we would be left with 80 million people standing on an Island in the cold with no food wondering what the hell to do next.
Perhaps I paint it to grimly but there must be a reason why all my oldest and dearest friends have left England for the USA, Germany, Belgium, pretty much any place never to return. If I return now I don't know anyone there any more.
A few choice quotes from one of my all time heros Fred Dibnah:
"The modern world stinks."
"We've become a nation of con men, living by selling double-glazing to each other."
"The thing is nowadays, you'll have 20 men working, yet 60 men telling them 'You can't do that, you ain't got a tin hat on'"
and my favourite:
"Teaching boys to bake cakes? That's no way to maintain an industrial empire."
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For me, the past is not over yet.
heater said...
No, after quite some years my Finnish is still very poor. It does not help that most Finns speak excellent English, they do not put Finnish sound tracks over foreign movies or TV shows and that when working at, for example NOKIA, all software and documentation has to be in English anyway. I did go to language school for half a year but boy is it hard. I've heard that Finnish is related to Hungarian but have yet to meet a Finn that would agree or understand how its possible. They seem to be much more comfortable with Estonian.
Strangely enough my father was a Czechoslovakian, in England since his time in the British army during the second world war, almost never heard him speak Czech and never did learn it. Very sad actually.
Sounds like you have another interesting board on the horizon is this one we can sign up for as well ?
Apparently, lots of Hungarians migrated to what is now Finland, hundreds of years ago. I can't remember why they bothered, Hungary has never been exactly over-populated. Perhaps it was a religious thing.
I've just created the PCB part for the XMOS, it's the biggest chip I've dealt with. It was surprisingly easy with the new version of the software I use. It'll have to go on a 6-layer board, of course. I'm chasing up some sample chips I requested a couple of weeks ago. The idea is to put four XMOS chips on one little PCB module - 16 cores and 6,400 MIPS! Lots of modules can be connected together for oodles of real computing power. I did something similar with the transputer.
Leon
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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
heater said...
Every now and then I think about returning to old Blighty. But then I remember that feeling I had in the nineties - that the north sea oil would run out, manufacturing would cease, Margaret Thatchers "service economy", by which I imagine she meant her friends in the banks, insurance and finance sector, would gradually drift away to where the real wealth is (HSBC anyone) and we would be left with 80 million people standing on an Island in the cold with no food wondering what the hell to do next.
Perhaps I paint it to grimly but there must be a reason why all my oldest and dearest friends have left England for the USA, Germany, Belgium, pretty much any place never to return. If I return now I don't know anyone there any more.
A few choice quotes from one of my all time heros Fred Dibnah:
"The modern world stinks."
"We've become a nation of con men, living by selling double-glazing to each other."
"The thing is nowadays, you'll have 20 men working, yet 60 men telling them 'You can't do that, you ain't got a tin hat on'"
and my favourite:
"Teaching boys to bake cakes? That's no way to maintain an industrial empire."
Dickens had a good way of expressing it: "People making a living by taking in each other's washing!"
Leon
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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
that board sounds interesting, if it is populated... I'd may be interested (populated just with the processors of course), BGA is a bit too far for my skills (read: tools, eyes, hands). I submitted a request for the dev kit, let's see if these people deliver to Germany at reasonable prices
(On a political note: may be the country is sort of suffering what it made others suffer... It forced many countries into monoculture and no industry; an extreme case being Paraguay!. Very sad.)
that board sounds interesting, if it is populated... I'd may be interested (populated just with the processors of course), BGA is a bit too far for my skills (read: tools, eyes, hands). I submitted a request for the dev kit, let's see if these people deliver to Germany at reasonable prices
(On a political note: may be the country is sort of suffering what it made others suffer... It forced many countries into monoculture and no industry; an extreme case being Paraguay!. Very sad.)
I've just heard that they will be accepting orders from Friday. I don't know if they will be emailing people who have reserved them, so it would be a good idea to check the web site.
Leon
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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
I just had a long phone call from the XMOS sales director. He's interested in a couple of my projects and is getting me some sample chips.
I just asked XMOS how fast the internal XLInks run - it's 3.2 GBit/s! External XLinks are a lot slower, of course. I think they are clocked at up to 100 MHz.
Leon
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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
Those 3.2GBps should be the aggregated throughput. Impressive nonetheless. Interesting also is the fact that if you have 1 thread per core you have 400 MIPS just for that thread. At that frequency a nice video generator can be made with on line rasterization and no bitmap. I hope they fulfill the dev kits orders. OTOH chips will be available soon !!
Leon, hows the XMOS thing going for you, got the dev kit up and running? I've been studying the chip lately since I have more time on my hands and I can't help but scratch my head over the whole thing. I don't know if it's that it's uneccesarrily complex, the documentation is poor or a combination of the two. I still don't have a grasp on interprocess communications or how the thread scheduling really happens, and how do I do non-blocking mutual exclusion? I haven't seen a single graph or figure in any document to aid in any explanation. Do I have to rely on a higher level language toolset to handle it for me? That makes me very uncomfortable. And what's up with the instruction set? It looks like a blind butcher took a hatchet to the ISA, the only way to do conditionals are on whether a register is or isn't equal to 0? What the... what if I want to test for overflow or a myriad of other things that the average assembly programmer does on a day to day basis?
I dunno, it seems like a nice idea that was half heartedly executed, either that or I just don't "get it". The Propeller chip I had written the core functionality of the digital storage scope the first night after being exposed to it that morning, no way no how could I ever do that on an XMOS.
I find it quite fascinating - very high performance and quite easy to use. Lots of people are doing very interesting things with it, like high-res VGA and high-speed USB (480 Mb/s). There is a surprising amount of software available for it already. Support is very good, I usually get questions posted to the XLinkers forum answered in an hour or two.
You really need to study the chip in detail and look through some of the applications, it isn't all that difficult. It has a very clean, simple architecture. I worked with the somewhat similar Inmos transputer 24 years ago, so the concepts are quite familiar to me. The XC language is basically standard C with extensions for parallel processing. The instruction set was designed for efficiency, and executing high-level languages as fast as possible. Most of the time XC and C are all you need, with assembler used for time-critical portions of code. The VGA software I mentioned is mainly written in assembler. As with the transputer, people with a good grounding in hardware will be most at home with it whilst some software people might find it difficult.
Leon
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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
Comments
Perhaps I paint it to grimly but there must be a reason why all my oldest and dearest friends have left England for the USA, Germany, Belgium, pretty much any place never to return. If I return now I don't know anyone there any more.
A few choice quotes from one of my all time heros Fred Dibnah:
"The modern world stinks."
"We've become a nation of con men, living by selling double-glazing to each other."
"The thing is nowadays, you'll have 20 men working, yet 60 men telling them 'You can't do that, you ain't got a tin hat on'"
and my favourite:
"Teaching boys to bake cakes? That's no way to maintain an industrial empire."
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
For me, the past is not over yet.
Apparently, lots of Hungarians migrated to what is now Finland, hundreds of years ago. I can't remember why they bothered, Hungary has never been exactly over-populated. Perhaps it was a religious thing.
I've just created the PCB part for the XMOS, it's the biggest chip I've dealt with. It was surprisingly easy with the new version of the software I use. It'll have to go on a 6-layer board, of course. I'm chasing up some sample chips I requested a couple of weeks ago. The idea is to put four XMOS chips on one little PCB module - 16 cores and 6,400 MIPS! Lots of modules can be connected together for oodles of real computing power. I did something similar with the transputer.
Leon
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
Dickens had a good way of expressing it: "People making a living by taking in each other's washing!"
Leon
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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
that board sounds interesting, if it is populated... I'd may be interested (populated just with the processors of course), BGA is a bit too far for my skills (read: tools, eyes, hands). I submitted a request for the dev kit, let's see if these people deliver to Germany at reasonable prices
(On a political note: may be the country is sort of suffering what it made others suffer... It forced many countries into monoculture and no industry; an extreme case being Paraguay!. Very sad.)
No idea about stuffing these ball grid array devices so it would have to be at least partially populated.
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For me, the past is not over yet.
I've just heard that they will be accepting orders from Friday. I don't know if they will be emailing people who have reserved them, so it would be a good idea to check the web site.
Leon
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
I just asked XMOS how fast the internal XLInks run - it's 3.2 GBit/s! External XLinks are a lot slower, of course. I think they are clocked at up to 100 MHz.
Leon
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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
Post Edited (Leon) : 10/9/2008 1:16:44 PM GMT
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For me, the past is not over yet.
I dunno, it seems like a nice idea that was half heartedly executed, either that or I just don't "get it". The Propeller chip I had written the core functionality of the digital storage scope the first night after being exposed to it that morning, no way no how could I ever do that on an XMOS.
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Paul Baker
You really need to study the chip in detail and look through some of the applications, it isn't all that difficult. It has a very clean, simple architecture. I worked with the somewhat similar Inmos transputer 24 years ago, so the concepts are quite familiar to me. The XC language is basically standard C with extensions for parallel processing. The instruction set was designed for efficiency, and executing high-level languages as fast as possible. Most of the time XC and C are all you need, with assembler used for time-critical portions of code. The VGA software I mentioned is mainly written in assembler. As with the transputer, people with a good grounding in hardware will be most at home with it whilst some software people might find it difficult.
Leon
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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
Post Edited (Leon) : 1/6/2009 8:35:41 AM GMT