
Weird and Innovative Chips (2007) - tragiclos
http://www.cpushack.com/CPU/cpu7.html
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emptybits
A more appropriate title, and actually from the article, may be: "Weird and
Innovative Chips".

Loved this post, anyways. I think it's important to look at radical and
strange computing paradigms from the past, even if their DNA is not obviously
in today's mainstream architectures.

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wyxuan
Would be interesting to see of there are newer examples of these weird chips.
After all, the post is only from 2005(from copyright info at bottom of page).

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jzwinck
The Tile chips and descendants made by Tilera and now Mellanox might fit the
bill. They were noted in the press quite a few times back in 2010-2013 or so.
They had 64 cores (sometimes other numbers) and could run Linux (or a bare
metal environment). The idea was/is to have a grid of identical cores which
can each talk at high speed with low latency to their four neighbors. The
"outer" cores used their outward-facing bus to talk somewhat directly to DDR,
Ethernet, and other ports. If a core in the middle wanted to do an Ethernet
send, it had to send the data to its neighbor and so on until it reached a
suitable "outer" core. And you could (perhaps even should) program these
communications explicitly.

Linux and GCC support meant it was easy to program, but perhaps not easy to
program well enough to beat x86 (which for most potential customers was
probably the more relevant comparable, rather than the DSPs, FPGAs etc that
Tilera suggested might be replaced).

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mikro2nd
Other interesting systems worth poking your nose into are the c.mmp and cm*
architectures developed in the '70s at Carnegie-Melon. Also ncube.

IIRC c.mmp was a multi-cpu-multi-memorybank setup where any cpu could connect
to any memorybank via a crossbar switch. cm* was (I think) some sort of multi-
cpu-multi-memory architecture with a packet switched bus as interconnect.

They all predate any possibility of being 'chips', so by that criterion
wouldn't have qualified for this article/book, but nevertheless are probably
still interesting.

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rajesh-s
Found a few posters on the history of computing:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22000407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22000407)

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dr_dshiv
I'm really hoping someone builds von neumann's harmonic integration computer
someday. It was patented after his death.

Feels like a better bet than quantum computing, but what do I know?

[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4065705](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4065705)

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jacquesm
The AMD 29000 series really should rate a mention in such an article:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Am2900_and_Am29000...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Am2900_and_Am29000_families#Am29100)

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protomyth
It does
[http://www.cpushack.com/CPU/cpu4.html#Sec4Part3](http://www.cpushack.com/CPU/cpu4.html#Sec4Part3)

~~~
ghusbands
That's a somewhat misleading response. It isn't mentioned in the linked
article, "Weird and Innovative Chips", but in an entirely different section
called "Unix and RISC, A New Hope".

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protomyth
The linked "article" is one chapter in a bigger work, and they only put chips
in one section even if they could be in two. It has an article in the greater
work as this is one chapter and shouldn't really be read in isolation as the
rest of the work references chips in different sections.

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atq2119
One wonders if some of these designs might make a comeback as Moore's law
slows down.

For the longest time, processor performance was dominated by who had the best
manufacturing process or, more recently, who could keep up best with fab's
updating processes.

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MisterTea
Interestingly enough, the AT&T Hobbit processor was used in the original BeBox
which ran BeOS (Which we discussed the other day.) Though only about 30
machines were made and were only used for internal development.

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/kdanvers2002/43385092882](https://www.flickr.com/photos/kdanvers2002/43385092882)

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AnimalMuppet
I was not impressed by the i432 architecture. Like the Multibus, it seemed to
be trying to be very fancy, but with no elegance or taste. The result was an
architecture that... um... might possibly have worked. It's still an ugly,
tasteless architecture, though.

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Veedrac
The i432 was well before my time, so it's hard to account for the privilege of
hindsight, but I found myself looking in horror at most of its design.
Hardware needs to account for the fact it's ultimately a piece of physics, and
the i432 dismissed this completely.

It's a real shame because the failure of old innovative architectures—faults
ultimately down to poor and complex designs—have burned people enough that few
people dare to try again. For all its flaws and forever-vaporware status, the
Mill shows that you _can_ make an architecture much safer without paying extra
as long as you do things with principle.

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MrEldritch
I think that the lesson of the Mill is that you can make an architecture much
safer without paying extra as long as you do things _in_ principle.

(as opposed to, say, in practice)

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voldacar
Other than the mill, does anyone here know of any particularly weird and
innovative chips being developed in 2020?

