Next Gen Propeller

Comments

• Mike Green Posts: 23,101

  2006-07-11 16:30 edited 2006-07-11 16:30

  Even stripped down, the Propellor is a large chip and wouldn't fit in a standard 20 pin or 8 pin package. It's mostly the 32 bit data paths that create the large size (see the pretty picture at <http://forums.parallax.com/forums/attach.aspx?a=8304>)
• cgracey Posts: 14,133

  2006-07-11 17:10 edited 2006-07-11 17:10

  What Mike said is the case - this chip is too big to go into smaller packages, even if we removed a lot of stuff. I don't want us to make reduced versions because I want peoples' software efforts to remain as valid as they can be, without lots of caveats. The next generation chip is going to have MORE of everything. That is the trajectory - MORE.
  
  
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  Chip Gracey
  Parallax, Inc.
• hammerhead74000 Posts: 58

  2006-07-11 17:36 edited 2006-07-11 17:36

  Not to tie you down to anything specific yet... but --- might more cog memory, more hub memory, and a hardware multiplier in the cogs be in the works? Also, what would it take to get a shared hardware FPU (I'm thinking of a single-precision unit accessed across the hub, with just basic operations on it - fpadd, fpsub, fpmul, fpdiv, fpexp, fpround, and some sort of sine calculation)?
  
  
  
• Beau Schwabe Posts: 6,547

  2006-07-11 18:16 edited 2006-07-11 18:16

  Mike,
  
  
  What's funny... That "pretty picture" is only a very small part of the Propeller. It only measures 290x175 microns.... To put that in perspective,
  a single dot from a 300DPI printer has a diameter of about 85 microns. The entire Propeller chip has a dimension of about 6mm (6000 microns)
  on a side. That picture is only 1/709th of the total chip real-estate.
  
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  Beau Schwabe
  
  IC Layout Engineer
  Parallax, Inc.
  
• Mike Green Posts: 23,101

  2006-07-11 18:35 edited 2006-07-11 18:35

  Just for curiosity, what section of the Propellor did that include? It's clearly not RAM or ROM and does have 8 similar columns with one additional one on the left side.
• hammerhead74000 Posts: 58

  2006-07-11 20:05 edited 2006-07-11 20:05

  Oh, yeah -- and you are gonna' call it the TurboProp, right?
• RinksCustoms Posts: 531

  2006-07-11 21:01 edited 2006-07-11 21:01

  Might there be a sketch for a PROpeller that has the power of a gamers desktop with the simplicity of SPIN?
  
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  Definetly a E³ (Electronics Engineer Extrodinare!)
  "I laugh in the face of imposible,... not because i know it all, ... but because I don't know well enough!"
• Beau Schwabe Posts: 6,547

  2006-07-11 21:41 edited 2006-07-11 21:41

  Mike,
  
  That's just a fancy 16-bit MUX
  
  
  
  RinksCustoms,
  
  Wouldn't that essentially be the HYDRA?
  
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  Beau Schwabe
  
  IC Layout Engineer
  Parallax, Inc.
  
  Post Edited (Beau Schwabe (Parallax)) : 7/11/2006 9:44:53 PM GMT
• Mike Green Posts: 23,101

  2006-07-12 00:15 edited 2006-07-12 00:15

  Oh well. I'm sure glad there are people like you who know what they're doing with little bits of silicon and tinier bits of various impurities carefully placed.