The speaker’s claim that it’s hard to find a two-character name that hasn’t already been used for a CPU architecture seems ridiculous on its face. And his tone seems to indicate that he knows that (to me, anyway).
I programmed the real F8 back in the day, so I’m quite defensive about it. It’s most charming quirk: doing a long jump clobbers the accumulator.
Wasn't quite as strong a match for "G8", but G[n] does show up in a lot of product descriptions to indicate what generation of the product is involved.
LG also put out a phone named the G8 Thinq in 2019.
I would generally agree with the speaker that it's hard not to collide when using a 2 character name. The "for a CPU architecture" narrows the collision space substantially, which does affect the full accuracy of the statement. But the spirit of "2 char IDs are collision prone" is true.
Oh, wow...never heard of the E8 or Andes, but I guess RISC-V startups are thick on the ground these days. And I can't imagine searching for G8 and not getting carpet bombed with hits for HP servers. But the fundamental question is still "why would you even want a 2 character ID in a world where searching for it (even without the massive historical name collision with F8) will make it fruitless to search for".
What a strange variation on Z80, extending it with 16-bit wide data paths... Who needs that? We have enough 16-bit ISAs around already, including PDP-11, original 8086 and even 65C816.
That was long after MSP430 were widely used, that pricing was part of the launch of the "value line" G-series (And it's associated MSP430 LaunchPad eval board, which is what was priced at $4.30).
I wonder what's the point. 8 bits is not enough to store most values for most applications, it's bad for timers and multiplication, it's just a big waste of CPU cycles in general. The more work CPU has to do, the less time it spends sleeping, which is bad for battery-powered embedded devices. Perhaps, it has its place somewhere, but realistically, an 8-bit CPU these days is very niche at best. Imho, it's not going to take off in mainstream embedded.
Personally I'm a fan of AVR-8 which has 32 8-bit registers so if you want to do 16-bit or 24-bit or 32-bit or 40-bit math you can do it just fine, it just takes longer. The biggest AVR-8 device has about 8k of RAM and about 240k of rewritable program ROM. Those are on different buses so it can suck down an instruction at the same time it transfers data, and clocked at 16 MHz it beats the pants off any of the 8-bit micros of 1980.
You're not going to create really large systems for it, but if you want to work a gas pump or a hot water heater or make a tester for 74xx chips or a display controller for persistence of vision displays it is great.
You can code for it in C but I feel like I'm strangling puppies when I do it because it is moving the stack pointer around and doing things to support C calling conventions that I don't really need for the programs I write [1] AVR-8 assembly is fun but I still write C for it because if I need a bigger device I can recompile it for ESP32 or ARM.
Something weird about AVR-8 is that it does not have a unified address space, so in the case of that display controller, it is easy to spool graphic data out of the ROM, not so easy to upload a small amount into RAM (via serial port) and combine that with data from the ROM. I've had the crazy idea of making a AVR-8 on AVR-8 emulator (would get me to A-rank if not S-rank on AVR-8 assembly) which would make it possible to upload tiny programs into RAM but that probably requires software emulation of unified pointers for program memory.
I've looked at F8's ISA reference and it has lots of instructions to support 16-bit numbers, including all the basic arithmetic and bitwise operations, plus loads/stores/pushes and pops. It's almost a 16-bit ISA, actually.
Which is just bizarre since, again, we have 8086, we have MSP430. And if you are fine with most of your data being 8-bit (which is not that uncommon), there is e.g. 8051 which is still quite popular.
This seems to be meant as pretty much 8051 replacement. 8051 cores are duct-tape of the modern computing and in almost anything, while 8051 is not exactly C-friendly architecture.
Also, a simple 8-bit CPU like the 6502 is just 3.5k transistors while simple 16-bit CPUs like the x86 or 68k are somewhere between 30k and 70k transitors (e.g. I wonder if a 6502 running at full throttle still requires less energy than an x86 or 68k doing the same work in the same time).
I haven't use these in a long time but fairly certain the memory address is more like 16 bit (otherwise, yeah how could you do anything). Still with 8 bit instructions many ops require several instructions. If that doesn't matter and it needs to be super cheap / small / etc., I think that is why these exist.
While I agree that repos with docs should have "releases", in GitHub parlances, with compiled PDFs/ebooks/whatever, building it yourself is as simple as
git clone https://github.com/f8-arch/doc.git f8-doc && cd f8-doc
docker run --rm -v "$(pwd)":/data fabtesta/ubuntu-xelatex make # or any other container with XeLaTeX that you trust
xdg-open manual.pdf
Out of curiosity, what would you prefer? I wouldn't say tex is my all time favorite format, but definitely better than 90% of the documentation solutions out there.
Faggin started the 4004 in '69 and Hoff was pushing off the bat for it to be more than a calculator chip so it could be used as a general purpose processor. So they might not have specifically been 'dreaming of controlling a toaster', they and others were clearly dreaming about similar control tasks, like printers. They wrote the history down, first person...you might check it out.
Or, gee, was the comment intended to tell us how you tied an onion to your belt in 1969 (which was the style at the time) and made toast as the good lord intended without any newfangled chips in the way, up hills both ways, and we should all get off your lawn? /s
C is undeniably a legendary programming language, but it's time to move beyond the constraints of the C abstract machine, which was heavily shaped by the PDP-11 due to Unix's origins on that architecture. C feels outdated for modern computing needs.
It lacks features like lambda calculus, closures, and coroutines—powerful and proven paradigms that are essential in modern programming languages. These limitations make it harder to fully embrace contemporary programming practices.
The dominance of C and its descendants has forced our systems to remain tied to its design, holding back progress. Intel tried to introduce hardware assisted garbage collection, which unfortunately failed miserably because C doesn't need it, and we are still having to cope with garbage collection entirely in software.
While I’m not suggesting we abandon C entirely (I still use it, like when writing C FFI for some projects), we need to explore new possibilities and move beyond C to better align with modern architectures and programming needs.
https://ziglang.org/ is a solid future C-replacement, IMHO. There's pretty much no downsides and all upsides from a C hacker's perspective. It just hasn't reached 1.0 yet!
Zig is a nice language, but from a 10000 ft view it's not fundamentally different from C (thankfully) - at least from the CPU's point of view. Any hardware that's a good match for C is also a good match for Zig.
Newly created programming languages specifically tailored to GPUs (e.g. all the shading language dialects like MSL, GLSL, WGSL, HLSL, ...) are not limited by backward compatibility restrictions to C - and the execution model of GPUs is very different from traditional CPUs, yet all those languages turned out not much different from C extended with a handful new types and attributes.
Intels iAPX 432 had failed because it couldn't beat the much simpler, faster and cheaper, 'stop-gap' x86 design, not because of some C or PDP-11 conspiracy (and the Motorola 68k was much closer in spirit to the PDP ISA and a 'better fit' for C, yet it also lost against the rather crude x86 design).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_F8
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