Chuck Moore's Creations

If you want to play around with the F18A instruction set, I wrote an emulator for it[1]. This also comes with a system to synthesize F18A code with MCMC, using the basic technique from the Stochastic Superoptimization[2] paper.<p>Additionally, there is an interesting project I worked on with several other people to make writing code for GreenArrays more accessible[3]. This includes a system for synthesizing and verifying F18A code using two different solvers (Z3 and Sketch[4]) as well as a system for automatically partitioning and laying out code over the different cores. It&#x27;s a work in progress, but well worth a look.<p>[1]: <a href="http://hackage.haskell.org/package/array-forth" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackage.haskell.org&#x2F;package&#x2F;array-forth</a>, <a href="https://github.com/TikhonJelvis/array-forth" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TikhonJelvis&#x2F;array-forth</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eschkufz/research/asplos291-schkufza.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cs.stanford.edu&#x2F;people&#x2F;eschkufz&#x2F;research&#x2F;asplos291-sc...</a><p>[3]: <a href="http://www.forth.org/svfig/kk/11-2012-Bodik.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forth.org&#x2F;svfig&#x2F;kk&#x2F;11-2012-Bodik.pdf</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://github.com/TikhonJelvis/array-forth-sketch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TikhonJelvis&#x2F;array-forth-sketch</a>, <a href="https://bitbucket.org/gatoatigrado/sketch-frontend/wiki/Home" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitbucket.org&#x2F;gatoatigrado&#x2F;sketch-frontend&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Home</a>

Amazing architecture; I remember reading about it and colorforth several years ago when I was researching parallel architectures. I almost want to buy a chip and mount it on a schmartboard, but I&#x27;ve got so much going on right now that I know it would probably sit there after that.<p>The real reason for my comment, however, is a question: is that idiomatic F#? If so, I like it! It&#x27;s got a lot of Haskell&#x27;s succinctness, power, and functional goodness without becoming a tangled mess of indecipherable symbols. Yes, you can write Haskell this way, but in my experience, almost no one does. If this is typical for F#, it deserves a (very close) look.<p>Add to that the fact that I was impressed with the readability and power of a bit of C# code the other day. I really got to give these MS languages another chance. It&#x27;s too bad I can&#x27;t stand the OS (and yes, I&#x27;ve tried Windows 8 -- even worse). How&#x27;s Mono these days?

I live in Northern California near Chuck Moore. He came and spoke at our office last week and showed off the new GreenArrays architecture. Afterwards we were trying to come up with things to disrupt with a super low power &#x2F; massively parallel chip like that. The problem he brought up is that in products like smart phones the power usage is in the display and the radio. So there isn&#x27;t much savings in a lower power processor.<p>But... After the discussion several of us wondered about electronic ink signage. With the Green Arrays stuff you could definitely be completely solar powered.<p>It would also make an interesting Personal Area Network central control unit for Quantified Self stuff using harvested energy.<p>I would support a kickstarter for either of those, but I&#x27;m not going to pursue them myself right now.<p>Green Arrays: <a href="http://www.greenarraychips.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greenarraychips.com&#x2F;</a>

As someone with little interest or knowledge in low level hardware, what are the advantages of this? What would you use it for?<p>edit: Just to clarify, with little interest I mean little interest in acquiring in-depth knowledge about it. I&#x27;m still interested in hearing about advances like this and their uses.

So, I&#x27;m actually looking right now for a microcontroller to run a bunch of real-time I&#x2F;O that may involve a certain amount of fairly timing dependent bit-banging. I&#x27;m planning on building a pinball machine, and so need something that can take input from a couple of buttons, a bunch of switches and some sensors, and drive a bunch of solenoids, LEDs, and the like.<p>Since I will need to do a bunch of PWM or possibly bit-banged serial protocols to drive all of the LEDs, and I want to have good real-time guarantees on input from the buttons and driving the solenoids, I&#x27;m trying to figure out what microcontroller I should use; something like a Propeller, or an FPGA, or maybe one of these, or something else entirely.<p>Anyone have any experience with these kinds of issues? Will the GA144 be able to do some fairly timing-dependent bit-banging reliably? I notice in the docs that they say the time it takes for each instruction to execute is not fixed. How would you go about doing a timing dependent protocol on these? Is there a high-resolution timer you can poll to ensure that your transitions occur in a timely manner? Or should I bite the bullet and start learning FPGA programming?

What to do with 144 cores? I just watched a video last week about a guy doing SDR to monitor wireless tire pressure transmitters. Every car sold since 2010-ish has at least four of them, each with a unique 32 bit ID, for police tracking purposes, err, to &quot;save the children&quot; or whatever BS.<p>Anyway the complaint was there are 127 or 121 or some prime number of different algorithms from different mfgrs so you need to run 120-something decoders to completely decode each protocol. This is a pain with a single core laptop. But with a 144 core forth chip I think giving each precisely one protocol to decode in parallel would be fine.

If you are interested in a more &quot;conventional&quot; Forth chip, check out the J1[1]. It&#x27;s 200 lines of verilog, so you can put it on an FPGA pretty easily.<p>But it&#x27;s even easier than that because the J1 is the basis of the Gameduino[2]. The Gameduino is a shield for Arduino that gives you a VGA interface, sprites, and graphics.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/fpga-j1.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.excamera.com&#x2F;sphinx&#x2F;fpga-j1.html</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;excamera.com&#x2F;sphinx&#x2F;gameduino&#x2F;</a>

I was at Chuck Moore&#x27;s talk at Strangeloop, it was... esoteric. From what I gather, it&#x27;s not really something you&#x27;d want to write a full application in - Forth came across to me as a very low-level language, much like assembler. Which makes sense given how the chip executes it natively.<p>also the dude did not wear shoes.

Sounds like the future if just for the low-power. « 144-core asynchronous chip that needs little energy (7 pJ&#x2F;inst). Idle cores use no power (100 nW). Active ones (4 mW) run fast (666 Mips), then wait for communication (idle).»

I saw a RMBP installed Windows while using the native resolution (2880x1800).<p>Maybe he needs more area instead of neater display. Screen area is extremely important for an electronic engineer.

The fun thing is that you can buy a 10 pack of chips off the GreenArrays website for $200.

I would love to see this video. The only link I could find [1], unfortunately, was behind an auth wall restricted only to attendees of the event. Does anyone know where it might be found?<p>1. <a href="http://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip?utm_source=infoq&amp;utm_medium=QCon_EarlyAccessVideos&amp;utm_campaign=StrangeLoop2013" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoq.com&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;power-144-chip?utm_source...</a>

I&#x27;d really like to see a Verilog&#x2F;VHDL design of this chip to see how it works. Does anyone know if I can get that?

The F18A reference doc is amazingly concise; all you need to know about the architecture in about 10 pages.<p><a href="http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/DB001-110412-F18A.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greenarraychips.com&#x2F;home&#x2F;documents&#x2F;greg&#x2F;DB001-110...</a> (PDF)

I&#x27;ve had two separate people tell me about forth and green arrays this past week. My interest in piqued. Someone please point me in the direction of a good introduction to the language and its merits.

Why the change to an uninformative title from &#x27;A CPU with 144 &quot;tiny&quot; computers, without clock and 5-bit instructions&#x27;?

How is this different from CUDA?