From: cclist at
sydex.com
To: cctalk at
classiccmp.org
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:56:58 -0800
Subject: Re: 1st stage loader for IMSAI - need ascii to binary conversion
On 26 Feb 2008 at 22:26, woodelf wrote:
In many ways, Seaforth is the quintessential
small Ontario town.
Or a boat, or a California town, or a Minnesota town....
Actually, the SEAForth processor seems to be the creation of a very
small firm:
http://www.intellasys.net/
With only 64 words of RAM and ROM for each of those 24 processors, my
guess is that some very fancy programming will be needed for anything
beyond simple tasks.
Actually, that FSK decoder for may be just the application.
Hi
It would be overkill but it was intended to be a flexible setup.
The ROM is rather limited but the way the processors are interconnected,
one can bring new code in from an external memory. Some of the processors
can be dedicated to transfering I/O and memory while the internal
ones would be doing the data processing.
Also, concider that they pack up to 4 instructions into each word of
ROM.
The interface between processors is such that one can execute instructions
directly from the neighboring processor. This makes the transfer of
data or instructions more efficient since the ROM of that processor
doesn't need to contain the transfer code.
The one thing I don't like is how they go to sleep. They sleep as soon as they
pass something on to the next processor and don't wake until that processor
reads the input. I'd rather have it sleep if there was a second data and
the first hadn't been yet read. Not as power efficient but It'd seem to
be better flow.
It also seems that a programming error could stall the entire sea with
a traffic jam.
It might be just the processor for building something that could extract
bit streams from hard disk and convert it to data. It seems fast enough.
For people like Tony, each processor could be treated like a component
in a circuit. Each with its own task to handle before passing data to
the next processor.
Dwight
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