On: AMD Tackles Coming “Chiplet” Revolution With New Chip Network Scheme

[bokchoi]

It reminds me of the GreenArrays chip created by Chuck Moore. There was some hubbub here on HN a few years ago about it -- what ever happened to it?

http://www.greenarraychips.com/

[chris_st → bokchoi]

After having programmed for some unusual architectures (CM2, others) I have to say that the GreenArrays chip looked to be... impressively difficult to program for.

Then I played the game "TIS-100" and found out that my intuition was very likely correct.

[corysama → bokchoi]

It certainly does seem like chip design is marching grudgingly from Core i7 to Cell BE and eventually to Connection Machine. Physics doesn’t really care about ease of programming.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine

[pjmlp → corysama]

The big difference is that Connection Machine enjoyed being developed in programming languages that were better suited to distributed computing, whereas current chip design we still need to drag system developers away from C.

[chris_st → corysama]

For the record, C* on the Connection Machine was a great language to program with.