Looking for a Xmas present ?
I highly recommend these books.
Great for the DIY crowd, or anyone thinking about the future!
Low-Tech Magazine
The Printed Website: Volume III & The Comments.
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/12/printed-website-third-volume.html
@corlin What a rabbit hole that turned out to be - thanks @corlin! I read a number of articles including the one on building a sustainable website (including all the comments.) It left me thinking about clockless CPUs as a better solution, and I found one (no longer available.) It's the SeaForth 40C18, a novel clockless CPU array of 40 nodes, all running #Forth. Some nodes can do analog I/O, others digital I/O and some just do compute. I would love to program this.
https://classes.engineering.wustl.edu/cse460t/images/8/89/S40C18_DataSheet.pdf
@corlin Intel bought Fulcrum Technologies, one of the first clockless designs, and merged some of the ideas into their own CPUs. This StackOverflow dialog contains some history and pointers to articles about the advantages of clockless CPUs.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/530180/what-happened-to-clockless-computer-chips
@corlin Continuing down the rabbit hole of low-power CPUs for sustainable web servers, I came across the GreenArrays GA144 144-core CPU array. It's like a 2-D version of the Connection Machine, but on a single chip, for $20 (pack of 10 for $200.) All connections are up, down, left or right. A CPU in the middle of the array can talk to four neighbors but can't do I/O. CPUs on the edge can talk to 3 neighbors (2 on the edge) and have analog or digital I/O ports. Corner CPUs talk to 2 others. 1/3
@corlin These CPUs are not clocked. If waiting for I/O or a communication from a neighbor, they consume zero power. Total power consumption if all cores are active is measured in microwatts. They're ideal for embedded applications due to the ridiculously low power consumption. Who invented these? Chuck Moore, creator of Forth. Naturally, the chips are programmed in Forth too. 2/3
@corlin There's a development board with two of these chips on it. The two GA144s are connected by the SERDES bus which runs at 400Mbps. 3/3
Thanks for these.
I vaguely knew about "clockless" CPUs in the early 70's, not my field, so did not pay attention. Then I moved on to other things. The application I heard about was satellite positioning, (star tracking), and thruster control.
We could change the old saying to read: "Low powered, small pieces loosely joined".
I have been reading the links you post.
@corlin I became interested in them after reading an article years ago in Communications of the ACM. They sounded like a great idea, but the paradigm shift is too big for the ecosystem that evolved around standard cells, standard cores, standard machine architectures, standard languages, etc.. The unique personality of Chuck Moore (we should probably call it OCD) also had a lot to do with the failure of Forth to take hold. Here's long article about Chuck and #Forth. https://www.forth.com/resources/forth-programming-language/
@corlin Yes - I dabbled in it too. I went looking for my book on Forth and another on Threaded Interpretive Languages from that era, but I must have thrown them out. I was surprised to see there are two #Forth kernels for #JupyterLab. I'm thinking about some digital filters I studied in the 70s and whether they're amenable to parallel implementation on the GA144.
@peterquirk
I actually learned a bit of Forth. It was the hot new thing in 1971.
At least with the compute nerds, I had to work with, This was my brief work out in some desert in Nevada, trying to use computers to model what happens when a very large number of "slow" neutrons bump into a small piece of heavy metal....
Did not work out did not have the compute power then, or even now.