6 May
2021
6 May
'21
7:13 a.m.
On May 6, 2021, at 9:45 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Thu, 6 May 2021 at 02:19, Jules Richardson via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
No reason why it couldn't be. It's the same age as C, so why not? :-)
I seem to recall an anecdote about Acorn hooking up the first prototype
ARM-1 processor and it working, despite showing no current draw on the
connected ammeter - it then transpired that the power supply was still
switched off, but it was so efficient that it was able to run via leakage
current on the connected I/O lines.
Oh yes indeed.
Sophie Wilson did a talk at the last ROUGOL meeting, last month. ...
She's really quite pessimistic about the future of microprocessor manufacture.
...
Firepath is more or less the "Son of ARM". Not much is public about
Firepath and this is one of the best references I know:
https://everything2.com/title/FirePath
It can do things like load 8 different bytes of data into a set of
registers, perform arithmetic on them, and depending on the result,
put the results back somewhere else or not, in a single assembler
opcode in a single cycle... and she feels that no contemporary
high-level language can usefully express such operations.
I suppose APL might come closest, but it's hardly mainstream. I find it an interesting thought that once the only
way to get more
performance will soon be to switch to radically different processor
architectures that always work in ways very loosely comparable to MMX
or Altivec (and their descendants), and write new programs in new
languages on new OSes that can exploit deep hardware parallelism.
My favorite "radically different" processing concept is by Martin Rem, in his
thesis "Associons and the closure statement" from 1976
(http://alexandria.tue.nl/extra1/PRF2B/7606837.pdf). I'd love to see that
implemented. He certainly gave no clue on how that could be done, and I haven't
reached any clue either.
Then there's Pinatubo (2016:
https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~jzhao/files/Pinatubo-dac2016.pdf) which seems related to William
Shooman's "orthogonal computer (from 1961; it was sold by Sanders Associates for
a while).
paul