8 ms·

Programming a 144-computer Chip to Minimize Power (2013)

127 points by colinprince 7y ago

falava 7y ago
Recorded at Strange Loop 2013. Please add (2013) tag. Edit: https://thestrangeloop.com/2013/programming-a-144-computer-chip-to-minimize-power.html https://thestrangeloop.com/2013/programming-a-144-computer-c...
- dang 7y ago
  Added. Thanks!
gaze 7y ago
I really love greenarrays and that entire social circle. It's an older group of folks that bought a historical house in Wyoming and do chip design, programming, everything with their own home-brew minimal set of software. It's an alternative universe of programming. It's almost a software and hardware design religion. I think everyone should know about it and that it's possible to work this way, even if you wouldn't personally want to. You may even find some of their arguments compelling. I love it.
- fogus 7y ago
  > I think everyone should know about it I would love to! Any further links to the life/work-style of said group?
  - gaze 7y ago
    I just warn you... I think the impulse is to look at this software and think "ok this stuff is kinda rough around the edges. I know, I'm gonna write my own IDE and Compiler and all that in my own language of preference, and use that instead." Do not do this. Learn their tools, their way of doing things, and really try to immerse yourself if you want to learn. Write your own FORTH. It really is a religion with strict opposition to unnecessary abstraction and complexity to a degree that will put most contemporary programmers off balance. If you go in with an open mind, you'll get a lot out of it.
  - gaze 7y ago
    I think it's more or less a continuation/extension of the ideas of FORTH. You should read their app notes and read the writing of Chuck Moore, Greg Bailey, Jeff Fox, Charley Shattuck, and other FORTH people to understand the ideas. I've also found very friendly to talk to over the phone.
    - fogus 7y ago
      From your original comment I got the impression that there was a Forth collective somewhere on a commune in Wyoming. I was VERY interested in that but will settle for the wisdom of the Forth luminaries.
      - elcritch 7y ago
        Here I was wondering how I never heard of the famed Forth collective of Wyoming... Still might visit them sometime just to see what cool things they might be doing. I wonder if they have a discussion venue there.
- barbegal 7y ago
  Has anyone used the greenarray technology for any real world applications? It seems to fit somewhere between an FPGA and a microcontroller, but it doesn't seem that obvious to me what the benefits are, maybe less power than a microcontroller but I can't find any clear cut evidence that is the case for a real world application.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - alaaalawi 7y ago
    you may find the following presentations in using ga144 entertaining, even if stretched. as Chuck Moore once said (I'm trying to get the ref) Forth is about sharing ideas rather than code. these videos are not pure coding session (even if they have their own share) but a mix of engineering and problem solving. - echolocation like bats - heart monitor - digital image processing - building ga144 controlled robot - low speed usb host youtube channel of Daniel Kalný https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVMrX6BlNjIeGfX0QcBobGg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVMrX6BlNjIeGfX0QcBobGg hope you enjoy!
- analognoise 7y ago
  These sound like my people. How does one join?
ansible 7y ago
Architecture and further details on the GreenArray chip: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/index.html#GA144 http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/index.html#GA1...
- so_tired 7y ago
  Do they need to optimize for reduced memory/communication patterns? Or is that going too far AFAIK, the memory-communication power can increase by orders of magnitude if u go off-core, off-chip, off-cache, etc.
so_tired 7y ago
Do they need to optimize for reduced memory/communication patterns? Or is that going too far AFAIK, the memory-communication power can increase by orders of magnitude if u go off-core, off-chip, off-cache, etc.
mastax 7y ago
Reminds me a lot of the Parallax Propeller: many simple cores optimized for bit-banging I/O and programmable logic. Of course this is much lower power and has many more cores. I think that many core architectures can actually be simpler to program in an embedded context than the traditional single core systems. It's akin to a hardware implementation of the actor model rather than an interrupt state machine or interrupt event loop. Being able to dedicate cores to single I/O tasks means you can bitbang almost anything. Here's HDMI running in a few lines of code on a Propeller 2 with no external components but the HDMI connector: https://forums.parallax.com/discussion/comment/1475075/#Comment_1475075 https://forums.parallax.com/discussion/comment/1475075/#Comm...
- gautamcgoel 7y ago
  I bought a propeller 1 as a teenager but never really did much with it... I recall that the propeller 2 is coming out soon, so perhaps it's time to jump back in!
  - amock 7y ago
    While it isn't ready for full production volumes you can purchase a Propeller 2 evaluation board right now.
- fortran77 7y ago
  The DEFCON 22 badge was done on a Propeller. I did a little pokeing around on it--very interesting architecture. But they don't all run at once.... It's just a way to switch contexts instantly.
  - duskwuff 7y ago
    They do all run at once. All eight "cogs" exist as discrete hardware within the chip, and can perform operations on their cog RAM and I/Os simultaneously. What doesn't happen all at once is access to main RAM. That's handled by a round-robin arbiter.
  - dkersten 7y ago
tachyonbeam 7y ago
I saw this talk live at Strange Loop 2013, and I'm going to be a contrarian: I wasn't impressed. I don't mean to bash Chuck Moore. Forth is cool, and this chip looks neat, but my impression is that this is a solution looking for a problem. Chuck Moore is having a lot of fun working on it, but he fails to convey why this is useful. The impression that I had is that the whole talk was Chuck Moore going "look at all the cool assembler tricks I can do!". At no point did he ever demonstrate how his chip could be used to solve anything resembling a real-world use case. Instead, what he demonstrated was that his architecture was very esoteric and impractical to use. Some time could have been spent explaining how this chip can do some common computation (matrix multiplication, image processing, anything) more efficiently than an ARM chip or something we're already familiar with. He didn't really provide any benchmarks of anything, be it performance or power consumption, and my understanding was that, at the time the talk was given, based on the Q&A session, that he had no customers buying said chips (I wonder why?).
- kleer001 7y ago
  > this is a solution looking for a problem Sounds like a bit of art to enjoy for its self.
  - tachyonbeam 7y ago
    And there's nothing wrong with that. I think programming is fun, and hardware design can be too. However, if you're a company trying to sell a product based on some specific claims, you probably should do more to convince potential users.
    - Koshkin 7y ago
      > should do more When possible, sure; otherwise, selling stuff could be fun, too.
- kick 7y ago
  They're making their second-generation chip right now, and I think there are a bunch of problems that this chip is an obvious solution for. Chuck Moore is bad at presentations to outside audiences. This should surprise no one familiar with the man. This doesn't make the tech less useful, though.
bitbckt 7y ago
A more accessible version of some of these ideas: https://www.parallella.org/ https://www.parallella.org/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mrighele 7y ago
The grid layout and having chip(let?)s communicating with the four neighbors reminds me a lot of TIS-100 [1], I'm wondering if the game was inspired by this chip. Hopefully the real chip is easier to program :-). [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/370360/TIS100/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/370360/TIS100/
- cptnapalm 7y ago
  I swear that the line limitation in TIS-100 was just to drive me nuts. The shear number of times I just needed ONE MORE LINE... Loved that game.
dang 7y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6940552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6940552
ngcc_hk 7y ago
Strange it is all software like. Any hardware to see, to buy one or few times try, emulator to see etc. both the video and the YouTube by another guys seems no such thing.
- honkybozo 7y ago
  See reply to your other post :)
ngcc_hk 7y ago
Can I repeat my question: how to get something on-hand (like the board, the programmer and even the working environment setup) per this document http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/support/index.html http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/support/index.html It is very strange. It is like a shop without a front to get things, but keep on trying to tell you - once you got it, you can do wonderful thing. What is the point?
- honkybozo 7y ago
  You can place orders for chips and evaluation kits right on the website; take Product Offerings in the menu on the left side of the browser, and you will see this page: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/index.html http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/index.html
honkybozo 7y ago
Greetings from Greg Bailey in Cheyenne, Wyoming where GreenArrays can say, paraphrasing Steve McQueen at the end of the superb movie Papillon, "We're still here, you Bastards!!!" As an experiment, I will be happy to address any question that anyone might have, including those appearing in this thread, at the GreenArrays shop and lecture hall in Second Life. I propose to stand there, virtually, at 0800 PDT / 1500 UTC / 1700 CET / Midnight in Sydney, AU, on Wednesday, 13 May and again on Saturday, 16 May. The SLURL for the shop is http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Deneb/80/228/27 http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Deneb/80/228/27 and the name of the shop is "GreenArrays Ventures". My name in SL is GregBailey with UUID f64abbc5-7136-40db-9dd0-a174d93d8742 and I will wait for one hour before logging if no one has shown up. The experiment will be interesting, whether or not it produces positive results. Failing that I may find time to reply on these threads, and we do reply to questions sent to sales mailbox, domain greenarraychips.com. So, see you Wednesday or Saturday, perhaps. Advice: To minimize wasted time, kindly go to http://www.greenarraychips.com http://www.greenarraychips.com and do a little studying, or perhaps audit some of the lectures on the arrayForth Institute that is linked from the above, or preferably both. For the questions about what is it good for, anyone who can multiply the average power of a typical edge device in the "Internet of Things" by whichever fanciful power of ten (we are up to 12 now, are we not?) the Visionaries expect to exist of those edge devices, and then contemplate the obscene amount of average power that product represents, should be able to grasp that by wasting orders of magnitude less resources, including energy, than others do, we ought to be obviously good for something there if nowhere else:) And now back to work on a software defined GPS receiver. I look forward to meeting anyone who might make it on Weds or Saturday! I wish you well - Greg
- honkybozo 7y ago
  Regrets, that was 0100 on appropriate day Sydney :)
- honkybozo 7y ago
  Daniel Kalny and I waited the full hour in Second Life but no one else showed up. Daniel of course had never heard of Second Life but had no problem creating an account, making an avatar and finding the shop yesterday. Perhaps on Saturday I will see someone from this rather ephemeral thread :) Why ask questions but not come for answers? Best - Greg

127 points by colinprince 7y ago

Recorded at Strange Loop 2013. Please add (2013) tag. Edit: https://thestrangeloop.com/2013/programming-a-144-computer-chip-to-minimize-power.html https://thestrangeloop.com/2013/programming-a-144-computer-c...

dang 7y ago
Added. Thanks!

gaze 7y ago

I really love greenarrays and that entire social circle. It's an older group of folks that bought a historical house in Wyoming and do chip design, programming, everything with their own home-brew minimal set of software. It's an alternative universe of programming. It's almost a software and hardware design religion. I think everyone should know about it and that it's possible to work this way, even if you wouldn't personally want to. You may even find some of their arguments compelling. I love it.

fogus 7y ago
> I think everyone should know about it I would love to! Any further links to the life/work-style of said group?
- gaze 7y ago
  I just warn you... I think the impulse is to look at this software and think "ok this stuff is kinda rough around the edges. I know, I'm gonna write my own IDE and Compiler and all that in my own language of preference, and use that instead." Do not do this. Learn their tools, their way of doing things, and really try to immerse yourself if you want to learn. Write your own FORTH. It really is a religion with strict opposition to unnecessary abstraction and complexity to a degree that will put most contemporary programmers off balance. If you go in with an open mind, you'll get a lot out of it.
- gaze 7y ago
  I think it's more or less a continuation/extension of the ideas of FORTH. You should read their app notes and read the writing of Chuck Moore, Greg Bailey, Jeff Fox, Charley Shattuck, and other FORTH people to understand the ideas. I've also found very friendly to talk to over the phone.
  - fogus 7y ago
    From your original comment I got the impression that there was a Forth collective somewhere on a commune in Wyoming. I was VERY interested in that but will settle for the wisdom of the Forth luminaries.
    - elcritch 7y ago
      Here I was wondering how I never heard of the famed Forth collective of Wyoming... Still might visit them sometime just to see what cool things they might be doing. I wonder if they have a discussion venue there.
barbegal 7y ago
Has anyone used the greenarray technology for any real world applications? It seems to fit somewhere between an FPGA and a microcontroller, but it doesn't seem that obvious to me what the benefits are, maybe less power than a microcontroller but I can't find any clear cut evidence that is the case for a real world application.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- alaaalawi 7y ago
  you may find the following presentations in using ga144 entertaining, even if stretched. as Chuck Moore once said (I'm trying to get the ref) Forth is about sharing ideas rather than code. these videos are not pure coding session (even if they have their own share) but a mix of engineering and problem solving. - echolocation like bats - heart monitor - digital image processing - building ga144 controlled robot - low speed usb host youtube channel of Daniel Kalný https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVMrX6BlNjIeGfX0QcBobGg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVMrX6BlNjIeGfX0QcBobGg hope you enjoy!
analognoise 7y ago
These sound like my people. How does one join?

ansible 7y ago

Architecture and further details on the GreenArray chip: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/index.html#GA144 http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/index.html#GA1...

so_tired 7y ago
Do they need to optimize for reduced memory/communication patterns? Or is that going too far AFAIK, the memory-communication power can increase by orders of magnitude if u go off-core, off-chip, off-cache, etc.

so_tired 7y ago

Do they need to optimize for reduced memory/communication patterns? Or is that going too far AFAIK, the memory-communication power can increase by orders of magnitude if u go off-core, off-chip, off-cache, etc.

mastax 7y ago

Reminds me a lot of the Parallax Propeller: many simple cores optimized for bit-banging I/O and programmable logic. Of course this is much lower power and has many more cores. I think that many core architectures can actually be simpler to program in an embedded context than the traditional single core systems. It's akin to a hardware implementation of the actor model rather than an interrupt state machine or interrupt event loop. Being able to dedicate cores to single I/O tasks means you can bitbang almost anything. Here's HDMI running in a few lines of code on a Propeller 2 with no external components but the HDMI connector: https://forums.parallax.com/discussion/comment/1475075/#Comment_1475075 https://forums.parallax.com/discussion/comment/1475075/#Comm...

gautamcgoel 7y ago
I bought a propeller 1 as a teenager but never really did much with it... I recall that the propeller 2 is coming out soon, so perhaps it's time to jump back in!
- amock 7y ago
  While it isn't ready for full production volumes you can purchase a Propeller 2 evaluation board right now.
fortran77 7y ago
The DEFCON 22 badge was done on a Propeller. I did a little pokeing around on it--very interesting architecture. But they don't all run at once.... It's just a way to switch contexts instantly.
- duskwuff 7y ago
  They do all run at once. All eight "cogs" exist as discrete hardware within the chip, and can perform operations on their cog RAM and I/Os simultaneously. What doesn't happen all at once is access to main RAM. That's handled by a round-robin arbiter.
- dkersten 7y ago

tachyonbeam 7y ago

I saw this talk live at Strange Loop 2013, and I'm going to be a contrarian: I wasn't impressed. I don't mean to bash Chuck Moore. Forth is cool, and this chip looks neat, but my impression is that this is a solution looking for a problem. Chuck Moore is having a lot of fun working on it, but he fails to convey why this is useful. The impression that I had is that the whole talk was Chuck Moore going "look at all the cool assembler tricks I can do!". At no point did he ever demonstrate how his chip could be used to solve anything resembling a real-world use case. Instead, what he demonstrated was that his architecture was very esoteric and impractical to use. Some time could have been spent explaining how this chip can do some common computation (matrix multiplication, image processing, anything) more efficiently than an ARM chip or something we're already familiar with. He didn't really provide any benchmarks of anything, be it performance or power consumption, and my understanding was that, at the time the talk was given, based on the Q&A session, that he had no customers buying said chips (I wonder why?).

kleer001 7y ago
> this is a solution looking for a problem Sounds like a bit of art to enjoy for its self.
- tachyonbeam 7y ago
  And there's nothing wrong with that. I think programming is fun, and hardware design can be too. However, if you're a company trying to sell a product based on some specific claims, you probably should do more to convince potential users.
  - Koshkin 7y ago
    > should do more When possible, sure; otherwise, selling stuff could be fun, too.
kick 7y ago
They're making their second-generation chip right now, and I think there are a bunch of problems that this chip is an obvious solution for. Chuck Moore is bad at presentations to outside audiences. This should surprise no one familiar with the man. This doesn't make the tech less useful, though.

bitbckt 7y ago

A more accessible version of some of these ideas: https://www.parallella.org/ https://www.parallella.org/

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mrighele 7y ago

The grid layout and having chip(let?)s communicating with the four neighbors reminds me a lot of TIS-100 [1], I'm wondering if the game was inspired by this chip. Hopefully the real chip is easier to program :-). [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/370360/TIS100/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/370360/TIS100/

cptnapalm 7y ago
I swear that the line limitation in TIS-100 was just to drive me nuts. The shear number of times I just needed ONE MORE LINE... Loved that game.

dang 7y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6940552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6940552

ngcc_hk 7y ago

Strange it is all software like. Any hardware to see, to buy one or few times try, emulator to see etc. both the video and the YouTube by another guys seems no such thing.

honkybozo 7y ago
See reply to your other post :)

ngcc_hk 7y ago

Can I repeat my question: how to get something on-hand (like the board, the programmer and even the working environment setup) per this document http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/support/index.html http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/support/index.html It is very strange. It is like a shop without a front to get things, but keep on trying to tell you - once you got it, you can do wonderful thing. What is the point?

honkybozo 7y ago
You can place orders for chips and evaluation kits right on the website; take Product Offerings in the menu on the left side of the browser, and you will see this page: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/index.html http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/index.html

honkybozo 7y ago

Greetings from Greg Bailey in Cheyenne, Wyoming where GreenArrays can say, paraphrasing Steve McQueen at the end of the superb movie Papillon, "We're still here, you Bastards!!!" As an experiment, I will be happy to address any question that anyone might have, including those appearing in this thread, at the GreenArrays shop and lecture hall in Second Life. I propose to stand there, virtually, at 0800 PDT / 1500 UTC / 1700 CET / Midnight in Sydney, AU, on Wednesday, 13 May and again on Saturday, 16 May. The SLURL for the shop is http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Deneb/80/228/27 http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Deneb/80/228/27 and the name of the shop is "GreenArrays Ventures". My name in SL is GregBailey with UUID f64abbc5-7136-40db-9dd0-a174d93d8742 and I will wait for one hour before logging if no one has shown up. The experiment will be interesting, whether or not it produces positive results. Failing that I may find time to reply on these threads, and we do reply to questions sent to sales mailbox, domain greenarraychips.com. So, see you Wednesday or Saturday, perhaps. Advice: To minimize wasted time, kindly go to http://www.greenarraychips.com http://www.greenarraychips.com and do a little studying, or perhaps audit some of the lectures on the arrayForth Institute that is linked from the above, or preferably both. For the questions about what is it good for, anyone who can multiply the average power of a typical edge device in the "Internet of Things" by whichever fanciful power of ten (we are up to 12 now, are we not?) the Visionaries expect to exist of those edge devices, and then contemplate the obscene amount of average power that product represents, should be able to grasp that by wasting orders of magnitude less resources, including energy, than others do, we ought to be obviously good for something there if nowhere else:) And now back to work on a software defined GPS receiver. I look forward to meeting anyone who might make it on Weds or Saturday! I wish you well - Greg

honkybozo 7y ago
Regrets, that was 0100 on appropriate day Sydney :)
honkybozo 7y ago
Daniel Kalny and I waited the full hour in Second Life but no one else showed up. Daniel of course had never heard of Second Life but had no problem creating an account, making an avatar and finding the shop yesterday. Perhaps on Saturday I will see someone from this rather ephemeral thread :) Why ask questions but not come for answers? Best - Greg