David May, parallel processors. Xmos

Interesting read
HERE.

interesting indeed, I rember learning a bit of Occam when was at Oxford in 1985 in the last year of my degree. Never had a transputer to try it out on though!

Very interesting.. so XMOS and as a consequence the X1000 are linked to that..

Makes me want one even more!!!

Interesting read.

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funny way is he calling the mem issue an bottle neack and then prise xmos chips. pepole in amiga land are bashing the xmos chips becuse the system cant contact the mem and becuse the xmos has too little mem on it. personli i like the xmos chip idear on the a1000 but dont know what it can be used for in real pratic

I work for ST in bristol, in the old Inmos building :)

It is the external memory that is a bottleneck. The on-chip (now called cache)
memory is what was added to help with the problem.

If you could load and run all programs out of cache memory it would avoid
the need to go outside of the CPU to find the next instruction or store a
result, which in turn may require yet another instruction fetch.

Xmos chips are not designed as large do-it-all CPUs that must keep their
finger on the pulse of even the smallest of tasks. Instead they are given
their instructions and told to get-it-done, or work with other chips that
have their orders, and report back when the job is finished and await further instructions.
The big boss should not need to concern himself with tightening every screw in the proper order, and then sweep the floor.

As for access to main memory. Xena/Xorro can communicate with the CPU and
there is the inline PCIe slot which may provide DMA for fully independent
operation of a subsystem.

What can it be used for?
What can you dream up that fits within the operational parameters of
software defined CPUs?

First question should be:
What do I need to help me understand how to apply this technology, and way
of thinking, to real world situations and virtual world ideas.

Thanks for the post. It sure was an interesting read. I still remember Transputers being shown on Tomorrows World.

Mike

mechanic thank your very much for your post. i am glad that there fixed that issue.as i can remember the xmos chip is all so duel core but trevor or was it the varrysis? guy that said it was not a very good bruteforce cpu, so agen you are right.
can you give any examples on what it can do for awage amiga ussers ???. any way can it do stuff you cant do on FPGA. or way is it so hype. can you do a ampliffer and then do some sound filthering ?

was the dev not made with java with wee dont have ???
iff you are making a program on debian then compile the code to amiga will it then works in os 4.x how does the hardware communicate.


anyway can you give som more examples on things this could do.

The basic language of Xcore chips is C, with extensions in it's own
language called XC. Yes, they are both available on Linux and in compiled
form should work under OS4.

Other things to do(??)

How about a three axis mouse/joystick. X,Y,and Z. Something like a sprite
that you move left-right, up-down, in-out (larger-smaller) to get around
in a game. I'm not a game player, but you know how, like in Doom, the bad
guys can run away but you can't see your avatar chase them, nor can you
see another bad guy pop out and attack you. You turn your head to look
for one and wind up falling off an edge. If you had a 3 axis mouse and
a game written for it...........whole new experience.

When you're done playing the game you place the special mouse in a cradle
so it can monitor your weather station and simply tell Xena to have her
workers change jobs with a push of F6, or a click of the standard mouse.

Oh boy! What I would have given to have this technology when I was into
model trains. Disrtibuted CPUs all talking to one another and under my
master control. King Of The World!

i have a mouse like that in build with my vr glasses. http://www.3dvisor.com/

it works just like an normal mouse. it pops op as a normal mouse ( like any usb) mouse.in some games were you are moving with the mouse an you have to hold a key down to use "free lock" then you can go to prefs an set up mouse2 to do freelock and then set the capluck key to activate "freelock" when you get inside the game u turn the 3d on then you push the capz key when you have synzonized your head with centum of the monitor..

yes it is another exerpize but mostly becuse og the head mounted dispay and the 3d..

i am not quirte sure i understand how the . X,Y,and Z world work with the xmos or how to do it the way you discraped.

there is most suport for thease with plane simolators. if your are using a joystick and use "the mouse to freelock"

u can se the video with the link.
maby i should send hans a pair of iglasses from edimsional.
i have previos offerd a couple to the friden brothers but ther didnt had the time to do 3d drivers...

As I said, I'm not much of a game player.

For XYZ I was thinking of actually having to lift the controller off
the table for the Y direction, and forward-back for Z. Perhaps for a
game a glove would work better than a visor for what I was thinking
about.

If USB is used for this more than 1 port would be required, however
Xmos can be programmed to use several lines in parallel, (and then
easily modified for some other purpose) and thus avoid the conversions
from serial to parallel to get a full binary word to - - wherever it
needs to go. Since the inputs are talking to a CPU even further
processing could be done on-chip before presenting to data to the rest
of the system.

Nice read, I remember back in the day when there were talks about Transputer based accelerator cards (for 3D) to be eventually available for the Amiga, now we have an entire Xmos subsystem built in the next machine. Must have been destiny

dax ??? with accelerator card was that.
what acc card had a transputer for gfx and a cpu i never heard about it

Video Card.....hmmmm?

With the 'chip' RAM onboard, and the processors (GPUs) having access to that RAM, doing one special function.....
Sounds like 'Transputer' type thinking to me.

Except for the cache, sounds like an Amiga. Hmmmmmm.

what kind of classics acc card was transputer driven. as fare as i can remember the only gfx card for acc is bvision

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Hmmmm - given AEon's description "The uses are endless; control hardware, DSP functions, robotics, display - even SID chip and console emulators." I'd say it might even be possible to create a real 3d - holographic - video output. Already back in the late seventies/early eighties I was dreaming of an holographic 3d video combined with 8 channel 3d audio and made some experiments with 3d sound...

@retro
Some people will bash *anything* they don't understand (or worse, wrongly *think* they understand).

XMOS chips are not designed to replace CPUs, which is why they look bad if you imagine of them as doing general CPU-like jobs. XMOS chips have very specific talents. If you can find a job which uses those talents, then they will excel.

IMHO, XMOS chips are not well suited to emulating old consoles/computers... but they might be well suited to emulating certain *parts* of old consoles/computers.

I think that why micro multicore machines with separate memory still hasn't happen is because most daily tasks for a desktop computer cannot be divided into thousands of individual and fairly independand computing blocks. It simply is'n practical for many applications.

Really only in servers where one machine (with possibly thousands of cores) serves thousands of individual users at the same time it makes really good sense.

But stuff like video encoding/playing or compiling which is really heavy stuff it just cannot be split up very much, unless again, with the server doing thousand video encodings at the same time (like when everyone uploads to youtube for example).