31 Jul
2007
31 Jul
'07
8:52 a.m.
On 7/31/07, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On Jul 31, 2007, at 11:03 AM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
Ooh... there's something I haven't heard of before - a dual-core
PDP-8.
That could be an interesting project.
The hardware is a no-brainer (I'm visualizing something like the
DA11 interprocessor buffer but with appropriate architectural
adjustments for the PDP-8)
Sure. Makes sense.
I wonder how much of an 8/i would fit in a current
FPGA?
How much of an 8/i? I think you mean "how many 8/is"! ..but...the software...thinking of that on
an -8 just makes my head hurt.
Well.... I remember a particular dual -8/m configuration at Ohio State
in the Veterinary College. It was a mass spectrometer rig for
analyzing drugs in race horse urine. One -8/m was always connected to
the mass spec, the other to a tape drive, with 4-6 Diablo RK03-type
drives and a dual-ported disk controller. It wasn't hot-swappable -
you manually selected which drives responded to which CPU, then
rebooted the CPU that needed to access the "new" drives. With OS/8, a
reboot is rather quick.
If you wanted something more sophisticated, one could consider running
an updated RTS-8 with OS/8 as a task for each CPU. The RTS-8
executive could handle resource locking and sharing.
It would still be a feat, but I think it's doable.
-ethan