
Chuck Moore: Programming a 144-computer Chip to Minimize Power [video] - qznc
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip?utm_source=infoq&utm_medium=videos_homepage&utm_campaign=videos_row1#.UrMEcjUlt_s.reddit
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vanderZwan
I've been looking forward to this one! I have a soft spot for eccentric
inventors that challenge the status quo simply by doing things their way and
not blindly following conventional wisdom. Even if you disagree with them it's
good to have your assumptions challenged, if only because it makes you aware
of the fact that you have them.

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dmpk2k
The incredibly low-power usage of the chip is interesting, as is his
perspective of counting the energy of each operation.

You can run the chip full-throttle with a solar panel the size of your hand,
but where it shines is when it's not fully utilized. This is for (odd)
general-purpose computation, not ASICs.

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jballanc
Not sure how many people remember, but back in the PowerPC days of Macintosh,
the OpenFirmware chips actually contained a Forth interpreter implemented in
hardware. It always struck me that, should the need arise, you could use the
Forth interpreter to write a bootstrap C compiler, then use that to build a
proper C compiler and from there compile and load a minimal kernel. In other
words, starting with bare metal you could, in theory, get to a fully
functional desktop computer...

...one of these days maybe I'll actually have the time to find out if that
really works in practice.

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rbanffy
The OLPC XO machines also have it, as well as SPARC-based Sun workstations.

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xradionut
If only a geek could buy the latest version of the OLPC laptop...

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protomyth
If only a low-income parent could buy the latest version of the OLPC laptop
for their child....

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fidotron
Chuck Moore is definitely one of the great computing heroes, especially if
you're an idealist.

The problems with the GreenArrays product seem to be that it's too separated
from the rest of the world, and in order to successfully interface peripherals
(even SRAM, as covered in this video) to it requires completely grokking this
alternate way of doing things, in addition to understanding the low level
details of absolutely every interface.

Maybe I'm in the wrong circles, but right now if you can't shoot UDP packets
out of something it doesn't really meet the minimum baseline for connectivity.
If you're going to head off on your own (and certainly for energy purposes
there would be good reason to do so) you need to have a simple bridge back to
more standard land.

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honkybozo
Two of the GA144 evaluation boards on my bench here in my office both shoot
UDP packets out to learn the date and time when they boot. UDP over IPv4 over
bit-banged 10baseT. You may ping one of them at g144.minerva.com.

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fidotron
That's on the standard eval boards? You've managed to get me interested in
this rabbit hole again!

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honkybozo
We have a little piggyback board with transformer, 10 MHz fox osc, and a dual
op-amp to let us swing enough V to make the spec for twisted pair. Haven't
started offering them publicly yet, but the code has been running two years.
We gave an overview of the software defined NIC at SVFIG Forth Day 2012; video
and powerpoint available thru SVFIG. The code is in the current arrayForth
distribution. Still waiting for time to finish converting TCP to run on the
16-bit polyFORTH model but IP, ICMP, ARP, UDP all work. TCP only knows how to
send a proper RESET.

