Motor generator

[Paul Koning]

> 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:
>> 
>> 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.

No reason why it couldn't be.  It's the same age as C, so why not?  :-)

> 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