4 ms·

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

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 6y ago
> this is a solution looking for a problem Sounds like a bit of art to enjoy for its self.
- tachyonbeam 6y 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 6y ago
    > should do more When possible, sure; otherwise, selling stuff could be fun, too.
kick 6y 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.
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  Which problems for those of us who don't find it obvious? I'm a big fan of Chuck and Forth in general, but I don't do any embedded work since college, so I don't have much personal use for this kind of system that I can think of.
  - kick 6y ago
    See my reply to a different comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157949 AI is just the most obvious usage, though. It'd be unimaginative to just consider embedded uses: there are terribly practical uses for it. Consider that most big companies buy hardware based on performance per watt, then consider that GA144 blows most things out of the water on that front. GA also has a few recommendations (ripped from their site): APPLICATIONS  Energy harvesting applications  Portable devices  Remote sensing and data reduction  Ideal for parallel and/or pipelined work  Image processing  Complex control systems  Cryptography  High speed signal processing  Simulation and synthesis  Inexpensive, massively parallel systems for research and education  Artificial intelligence, neural nets
- adwn 6y ago
  > [...] I think there are a bunch of problems that this chip is an obvious solution for If those were really obvious, tachyonbeam wouldn't have to ask ;-) In your opinion, what are problems for which this chip would be a solution?
  - kick 6y ago
    'tachyonbeam didn't ask. The most obvious one is AI. These things are incredibly parallel & entirely self-contained, and a consumer desktop PSU could power countless amounts of them without a second thought. At $2,000 for 100 chips ($20/chip), you can start to do some really interesting stuff for the cost of a consumer laptop. It's natural that AI is a problem this chip excels at, given Moore studied under McCarthy and all. If you feel morally okay with playing with proprietary software, I really recommend playing a little bit with the simulator of the chip. Given what's intuitive with one or two, you'll probably be able to see the possibilities much better after an hour or so of play.
petermcneeley 6y ago
4mW running at 666 Mips. So is that 40W for 6.66 Tips ? If true then the perf/power is pretty decent. I could easily turn this in to a GPU.
astrobe_ 6y ago
An ARM SoC chip has a lot of stuff inside: it has USART(s), SPI controller(s), I2C controller(s), SDRAM controller, sometimes LCD controller, USB controller, ethernet controller, a crypto coprocessor, graphic acceleration... Of which you only use a fraction. It has logic to multiplex all those I/O to GPIO pins, and sometimes you have to choose between a second USB controller and a third UART. Because all this gates eat a lot of current, it has a lot of logic to power off parts of the core. In a way, popular ARM SoCs are a lot like bloated software. I think the GA144 can replace a lot of this, without all the hardwired logic, with less gates, less power, less heat dissipation, and probably less pins. Regarding his way of presenting it: I did cringe at times a little too. But at least he doesn't present it as silver bullet than can do anything easily with a C compiler and a Web programmer. Clearly his chip is as an oddball as his creator, so it requires some commitment.

kleer001 6y ago

> this is a solution looking for a problem Sounds like a bit of art to enjoy for its self.

tachyonbeam 6y 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 6y ago
  > should do more When possible, sure; otherwise, selling stuff could be fun, too.

kick 6y 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.

7thaccount 6y ago
Which problems for those of us who don't find it obvious? I'm a big fan of Chuck and Forth in general, but I don't do any embedded work since college, so I don't have much personal use for this kind of system that I can think of.
- kick 6y ago
  See my reply to a different comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157949 AI is just the most obvious usage, though. It'd be unimaginative to just consider embedded uses: there are terribly practical uses for it. Consider that most big companies buy hardware based on performance per watt, then consider that GA144 blows most things out of the water on that front. GA also has a few recommendations (ripped from their site): APPLICATIONS  Energy harvesting applications  Portable devices  Remote sensing and data reduction  Ideal for parallel and/or pipelined work  Image processing  Complex control systems  Cryptography  High speed signal processing  Simulation and synthesis  Inexpensive, massively parallel systems for research and education  Artificial intelligence, neural nets
adwn 6y ago
> [...] I think there are a bunch of problems that this chip is an obvious solution for If those were really obvious, tachyonbeam wouldn't have to ask ;-) In your opinion, what are problems for which this chip would be a solution?
- kick 6y ago
  'tachyonbeam didn't ask. The most obvious one is AI. These things are incredibly parallel & entirely self-contained, and a consumer desktop PSU could power countless amounts of them without a second thought. At $2,000 for 100 chips ($20/chip), you can start to do some really interesting stuff for the cost of a consumer laptop. It's natural that AI is a problem this chip excels at, given Moore studied under McCarthy and all. If you feel morally okay with playing with proprietary software, I really recommend playing a little bit with the simulator of the chip. Given what's intuitive with one or two, you'll probably be able to see the possibilities much better after an hour or so of play.

petermcneeley 6y ago

4mW running at 666 Mips. So is that 40W for 6.66 Tips ? If true then the perf/power is pretty decent. I could easily turn this in to a GPU.

astrobe_ 6y ago

An ARM SoC chip has a lot of stuff inside: it has USART(s), SPI controller(s), I2C controller(s), SDRAM controller, sometimes LCD controller, USB controller, ethernet controller, a crypto coprocessor, graphic acceleration... Of which you only use a fraction. It has logic to multiplex all those I/O to GPIO pins, and sometimes you have to choose between a second USB controller and a third UART. Because all this gates eat a lot of current, it has a lot of logic to power off parts of the core. In a way, popular ARM SoCs are a lot like bloated software. I think the GA144 can replace a lot of this, without all the hardwired logic, with less gates, less power, less heat dissipation, and probably less pins. Regarding his way of presenting it: I did cringe at times a little too. But at least he doesn't present it as silver bullet than can do anything easily with a C compiler and a Web programmer. Clearly his chip is as an oddball as his creator, so it requires some commitment.