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The Ascenium Rocket processor has no instruction set — Parallax Forums

The Ascenium Rocket processor has no instruction set

It's Friday - I didn't feel like decoding their webpage.

http://ascenium.com/

"The Ascenium Rocket processor eliminates the performance bottleneck of the classic CPU's deep instruction pipeline that has stalled CPU performance improvements for generations. The Rocket processor has no instruction set. Instead Rocket constructs a succession of hardware circuits in real time that implement the functional intent of the source code. Rocket is a breakthrough non-Von Neumann architecture that will change the world of computing!"

When I searched on google this pdf came up on the llvm site (Heater might like it because it has an FFT) which appears to explain it better:

https://llvm.org/ProjectsWithLLVM/Ascenium.pdf

Comments

  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2018-04-07 05:30
    Seems Ascenium was founded in 2000. That PDF you link to is is from 2005. Google did not find me very much about the project except this from 2004.
    http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~mmccorq/media/SCTI906.pdf

    Looks like Ascenium did not get off the ground.

    These kind of ideas seem to have been kicking around for ages. Instead of a big fat sequential processor lets have lots of little skinny processors working in parallel. Problem seems to be that nobody has managed to get a compiler for such a machine working properly.

    The idea is not totally dead. People like Microsoft will rent you time on huge arrays of FPGA that you can configure to do what you like.
  • heater wrote:
    Looks like Ascenium did not get off the ground.
    Their two-page website is current, though, carrying a copyright date of 2016. Apparently, they still have funds to pay a web host. :)

    -Phil
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    Presumably whatever the processing nodes were in their idea one can now implement a ton of them in a big FPGA. FPGA's are much bigger now a days.
  • If you lookup their current CEO on LinkedIn his starting date was Mar 2018. I don’t know how this is different than HLS (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_synthesis) with an FPGA-like fabric. My guess would be that they think that they have a very clever idea for the fabric. Wouldn’t be surprised if they made a mention of asynchronous logic.
  • Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi) Posts: 23,514
    edited 2018-04-07 20:21
    It almost sounds like a dataflow architecture with reconfigurable processing nodes.

    -Phil
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