[jim.p.davis@gmail.com: [Newbies] A squeak machine?]

This question was posted on the "beginners" list, but I suspect that
the inhabitants of vm-dev might be better able to provide an answer.

Dave

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Date: Fri, 5 May 2006 01:20:23 -0700
From: "Jim Davis" <[hidden email]>
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Subject: [Newbies] A squeak machine?
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Hi,
I'm just a post silicon test engineer for a company that is developing a
object oriented medium grain parallel processor on a chip. It's quite a bit
like a FPGA, but the chip implements ALU state machines and table lookup
logic. It has multiply / accumulate (dot product) units, datapath muxes and
lots of memory. The kicker is it's a tagged architecture, with 5 bits riding
shotgun on the 16 bits of data. That's 8 bits of tag and  2 ready bits for a
real-world 32 bit object.  I've heard talk in the office that a
harvard/princeton machine demo hack implementation would be nice, but  that
seems really 1950's .My first thought was to build a FORTH machine, or a
bunch of forth machines, But Squeak seems really attractive and it goes well
with the object oriented mindset of the company and the chip.
So? do you think I should burn a couple hundred hours of my own time trying
to cook this up?
BTW: this thing runs at 1 GHz and has 256 alu's,  64 macs,  tons of
registers and scratch and  2X266 Mhz 40 bit ddr2 dram interfaces with 256
Mwords of store..
AKA: Mr Jones.
Just how do I implement a parallel or massivly pipeline(d) squeak machine?

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Indeed - is Jecel on this list?

- Bert -

Am 05.05.2006 um 12:54 schrieb David T. Lewis:

Jim, if you have a standard C compiler and ansi libraries you should  
be able to get a basic VM running fairly quickly. As an example, it  
only took a few days to get a vm running on a custom StrongARM  
machine we built at Interval Research some years ago and that  
included a couple of revisions of the firmware to fix bugs.

If you don't have an ansi/C system.... well it might be a bit harder.  
And making use of the unique features of the machine is definitely a  
bunch more work!

If I understand you correctly, you have a 32 bit data word with an  
*extra* 10 bits of tagging?  Except you mention a 40bit memory  
system, so I must have missed something.
>
> BTW: this thing runs at 1 GHz and has 256 alu's,  64 macs,  tons of
> registers and scratch and  2X266 Mhz 40 bit ddr2 dram interfaces  
> with 256
> Mwords of store..
Sound fun. Does it have a TCM? That would be nice facility.
>
> Just how do I implement a parallel or massivly pipeline(d) squeak  
> machine?
Good question. I think the answer to that is something along the  
lines of <dr.evil>One *million*euros!</dr.evil>
Or alternatively contact me directly and we might be able to arrange  
something.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
ASCII to  ASCII, DOS to DOS.