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I've been playing around with some Greenarray[1] chips lately, and I have to admit that the core ideas are fascinating. Their particular variant of Forth is act
by tikhonj 14y ago
I've been playing around with some Greenarray[1] chips lately, and I have to admit that the core ideas are fascinating. Their particular variant of Forth is actually almost pleasant to use--certainly better than MIPS, which is my closest point of reference. (Ignoring crazy things like the color of identifiers controlling your program's semantics.) The chips are also extremely power efficient.
[1]: http://www.greenarraychips.com/ http://www.greenarraychips.com/
I've found having a mental model of a stack-based system far easier than even a simple register-based one. However, this might also be true because the Greenarray chips themselves are far simpler than any other CPU I've ever looked at.
And, of course, the fact that you have 144 cores on a tiny chip despite a cheap manufacturing process is also very neat.
- gruseom 14y agoOh, please write about your experiences programming those chips. I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to hear all about it. I'd particularly like to know how you deploy code to the 144 cores and how they talk to one another. Edit: that request is to anyone who has programmed the GreenArrays chips.
- batgaijin 14y agoYes, please write this! I'd normally just upvote your comment, but I feel like the sorts of people who play around with GreenArray chips are not that prone to blogging, at least by my googling...
- tailrecursion 14y agoAre you able to boot all the cores and get them functional? I like the design of these chips too, especially how each core "blocks" on its message queue by instantly going to sleep, taking zero power -- and then instantly wakes up the moment a message appears.