

Chuck Moore (invented Forth) announced new CPU: 144 cores, 100 billion ops/sec  - csmeder
http://greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/GA144.htm

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patrickgzill
I really, really want to like these guys - I have been following Forth,
Charles Moore, and colorforth since first reading up on Forth in 1996 or so.

However, the site is a dog's breakfast, and despite clicking around I cannot
seem to locate an actual binary to download and run colorforth on Windows.
Where / when can I buy an eval board? How do I connect it to ethernet, or USB?

Further, it seems to be a company where you have a lot of smart guys who are
retired, and they are just putzing around without a burning desire to really
take over the market they are targeting.

BTW it seems each core only has a very limited amount of RAM on it, 64 "words"
which means 32 bits on PCs and 18 bits (???) on the g18 core CPUs.

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joe_the_user
I think that colorForth _is_ the simulator.

I just downloaded it from:
[http://greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/code/af-34k2-...](http://greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/code/af-34k2-ga144-1-10-PD.zip)

It's only two clicks from the main page.

I don't know if I'll do anything with this or not.

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csmeder
Sorry about the title, I couldn't fit in who Moore is and have it make sense.
I wanted to say: "Chuck Moore, the inventor of Forth, announced GreenArrays
new CPU: 144 cores, capable of 100 billion ops/sec"

~~~
pvg
Forth inventor Chuck Moore announces 144 core CPU capable of 100 billion
ops/sec

80 chars on the nose.

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blue1
Very naïf question from a software-only guy: given that such a chip exists,
how is one supposed to USE this kind of thing? Like, maybe plugging some kind
of card on a PC? Or is it just interesting for hardware manifacturers?

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ableal
Given the chip, you can't get to the "software only" part until you have:

\- The chip mounted on a board with at least memory and communication.

\- Software on your machine to talk to the board and hear back from it.

In general, the most rudimentary development kit possible is to have the chip
on a board with a ROM socket, and some development setup that allows you to
burn code to a ROM. Then you plug the ROM in the board, turn the power on, and
see if it works ...

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joshu
Anyone ever worked with one of his cpus?

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csmeder
The only commercial company that I know of, but I don't know much, who has
explored using one of his CPUs is BMW.

.

If you want to try it out you can use their emulator:
<http://greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/cf-intro.htm> softsim is an
instruction level simulator for GreenArrays chips, using code you compile for
ROM and/or RAM, and with provision for adding testbeds to simulate I/O.extend
softsim to allow you to define and simulate external peripherals to interact
with using I/O pins.

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rbanffy
Wow. As an undergrad (equivalent - I live in Brazil), the best project I did
(the one I am most proud of) was a stack-based CPU that ran something very
close to Forth.

This is really, really cool.

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ajkirwin
100 billion instructions per second is what.. fast than the current Intel i7s?
Am I reading this right?

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Retric
I think it's about 10% as fast as a high end GPU, and around 2x faster than a
CPU.

Edit: That's flops not instructions, it could be faster than that if it's
doing multiple flops per instruction. Also GPU's have significant limitations
so it's not really possible to get those speeds on a generic workload.

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jules
Where did you get that information? This hardware cannot do 1 flop in 1
instruction. Far from it, actually.

~~~
Retric
Never mind. I was thinking of a diffrent chip then.

