i860: Re: modern stuff

[Eric Korpela]

On Wed, Oct 31, 2018 at 2:27 PM Eric Korpela <korpela at ssl.berkeley.edu>
wrote:

>
> I also seem to recall that the SERENDIP III SETI spectrometer used i860
> and Austek A41102 FFT processors.  I'm pretty sure SERENDIP IV used i960
> and Xylinx FPGAs to do the FFTs.  I'll look at the boards tomorrow.
>

I was wrong on both counts.  SERENDIP III didn't have a CPU on the board,
but had a state machine on one of the FPGAs to control storage into and
retrieval from the memory.  And SERENDIP IV did use the A41102 FFT
processors.  Apparently, SERENDIP V.v was the first that did its FFTs in
the FPGA.  Since then (SERENDIP VI) we've moved to GPUs, but that's less
than 10 years old so I shouldn't even mention it.

Here's the obligatory board porn.  (Yes, SERENDIP III was wire wrap).
https://purcell.ssl.berkeley.edu/~korpela/gif/SERENDIPIII.jpg  (that's the
whole thing)
https://purcell.ssl.berkeley.edu/~korpela/gif/SERENDIPIV.jpg  (that's 1 of
20 boards)