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It's not 144 CPU cores. It's more like 144 Forth computers, with their own memory and four ports to adjacent units, making up a network mesh where each unit can

by cess11 2y ago

It's not 144 CPU cores. It's more like 144 Forth computers, with their own memory and four ports to adjacent units, making up a network mesh where each unit can also make use of both stacks and RAM of its neighbours. So it's not like a computer with 144 1-core CPU:s sharing RAM and ports, or a CPU with 144 cores, it's something weirder and more reminiscent of a network of small computers.

7thaccount 2y ago
Yep. Thanks for explaining it far better than I could. I recall Chuck referring to applications like "intelligent dust" or something like that. He's clearly thinking very long-term (almost scifi) kinds of applications.
mananaysiempre 2y ago
Given the small amounts of compute and memory you get on each node (it’s certainly no Adapteva Epiphany or even Cell), it seems to me like it’s more of a replacement for a (low-speed) FPGA than a CPU or even a micro. And that’s not a bad pitch! Modern silicon certainly doesn’t like to be bent into a (single-layer) FPGA shape—the result is comparatively slow, expensive, and power-hungry—but accomodates specialized functional blocks very well, so a matrix of baby processors with accompanying memory sounds genuinely like a good idea for an FPGA-like application. Unfortunately, the GA144 is the only game in town here, and at $500 per dev kit they sure aren’t interested in hobbyists. So I’m left to admire it from a distance. (And $20 per chip is not a bad price considering the competition—as I said, FPGAs are expensive—but it still falls into the expensive-chip bucket. Not a lot of places are going to build a design around a unique expensive chip from an obscure source.)
- cess11 2y ago
  Chuck Moore has been pretty clear that he didn't come up with this as a replacement for x86 or ARM CPU:s. The way he talks about it is closer to what you hear among permacomputing folks, it's a platform for relatively fast general computation in low-energy settings. I've never implemented a gaussian blur on bitmaps with a FPGA, maybe it is simpler somehow than this example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwM0qfQqmdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwM0qfQqmdE

by cess11 2y ago

7thaccount 2y ago

Yep. Thanks for explaining it far better than I could. I recall Chuck referring to applications like "intelligent dust" or something like that. He's clearly thinking very long-term (almost scifi) kinds of applications.

mananaysiempre 2y ago

Given the small amounts of compute and memory you get on each node (it’s certainly no Adapteva Epiphany or even Cell), it seems to me like it’s more of a replacement for a (low-speed) FPGA than a CPU or even a micro. And that’s not a bad pitch! Modern silicon certainly doesn’t like to be bent into a (single-layer) FPGA shape—the result is comparatively slow, expensive, and power-hungry—but accomodates specialized functional blocks very well, so a matrix of baby processors with accompanying memory sounds genuinely like a good idea for an FPGA-like application. Unfortunately, the GA144 is the only game in town here, and at $500 per dev kit they sure aren’t interested in hobbyists. So I’m left to admire it from a distance. (And $20 per chip is not a bad price considering the competition—as I said, FPGAs are expensive—but it still falls into the expensive-chip bucket. Not a lot of places are going to build a design around a unique expensive chip from an obscure source.)

cess11 2y ago
Chuck Moore has been pretty clear that he didn't come up with this as a replacement for x86 or ARM CPU:s. The way he talks about it is closer to what you hear among permacomputing folks, it's a platform for relatively fast general computation in low-energy settings. I've never implemented a gaussian blur on bitmaps with a FPGA, maybe it is simpler somehow than this example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwM0qfQqmdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwM0qfQqmdE