Microprocessor Forum

Manufacturers are strutting their stuff at the Microprocessor Forum. Some of the rollouts: Turmoil writes "AMD has demonstrated working SMP. http://www.amd.com/news/prodpr/20165.html" hol writes: "German news site Heise.de reports that a German startup named PACT surprise-announced their processor design at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose. Apparently this thing is a 128 cpu parallel computing deal which has its roots in the programmable gate array world." infodragon writes "All Linux Devices.com is running a pretty cool article about an X86 chip running on 1 AA battery. They demonstrated it by playing a VCD movie. They also say that mp3s can be decoded/played on it."

Comments

PACT/XPP: At last a decent new architecture!

[Morgaine]

The world of CPU design has been quite stagnant in recent years. Yes, there have been truly massive improvements in an engineering sense, but architecturally speaking, the latest Pentium and the various 64-bit candidates are really no different to a little ol' Motorola 68000 at heart. Harvard, RISC and superscaler designs haven't departed significantly from the same basic and extremely limited architecture which dates back to three decades ago or more.

But PACT's XPP is a different thing altogether, a dataflow computing engine on a chip. This thing is so far outside the current norm that it holds exhalted company with only a very few select others: my list of such exceptional architectures would probably comprise the Intel iA432, the Inmos Transputer, the Crusoe, and now the XPP. (I'm only including real candidates for implementation as micros, not research or demonstrator platforms of which there have been many hundreds of great ones.)

It's beautiful!

My research work on parallel architectures and concurrent languages really needed hardware like this to blossom. I wish the XPP had appeared then!