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A .Net CPU
An anonymous reader writes "Windows for devices has an article about the .Net CPU. The chip is programmed with a subset of the CLR and runs the same software as the SPOT smart watches. Among other things, "[t]he computer module is implemented in the format of a 32-pin "DIP" (dual inline package) chip, allowing the module to conveniently plug into a standard 32-pin DIP socket. In addition, the ".netcpu CPU Module" integrates 4MB of nonvolatile Flash memory (interfaced via an SPI interface on the SoC). It also provides 24 general purpose digital I/O lines, which are multiplexed with other functions including 8 VTU ports, a USB port, two serial ports, and SPI and I2C interfaces." More information about the product can be found at the .netcpu company website."
Why does it seem scary? What do you imagine the chip will do?
.net CLR, that's all, in much the same way as Pentiums and Athlons, etc, are CPUs for x86 code. It's not going to prevent you from running Linux, or reach up and take control of your PC and/or spy on you for Bill.
It's just a CPU for the
It's official. Most of you are morons.
It's an embedded chip which has a CLR on top of it. Nice idea, sorry that Sun thought of it earlier ( The Green Project) - Sun seems to be consistently missing the BUS here. They came up with "Network is the computer" and now MS is selling ".NET " :)
I've seen a couple of stack based engines but by its polymorphic natureQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
They must be very small, but I think I can see them if I look really closely and squint a bit.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
No, it is a CPU for .NET CLR as much as a Gumstix is a CPU for Linux kernel. It's just a VM embedded on firmware, NOT a REAL CPU.
Btw, the JVM FPGA is a real example of a VM less execution (or more correctly , a native JVM + support libs).Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I'm waiting for a Parrot chip.
Now that would be exciting.
Parrot is not a very good design to put on a chip, for one single reason.
Too Many opcodes (1500 at my current count and growing).Morover parrot has opcodes which do very complicated things like "print_nc" which prints a FLOATVAL constant. Compared to that IL opcodes are simpler and JVM is still more simpler (CVM is even simpler - which is what I'm working on now).
Parrot is too complex, period.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I'd say that I see more
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
this thing seems like an overpriced piece of junk just trying to hawk its .NET and VS support. Most of the microcontrollers out there i have seen can in some way or another be programmed in C and its various forms. 200 dollars just for the cpu seems to be asking a lot when the only advantage i see is that is 4mb of flash, and other MC's can always be expanded to that anyway. Besides the fact that other MC's out there that are cheaper also contain a whole lot more peripherals and features than this one. But maybe thats just me
Sorry, Microsoft-- just because you want something to be true doesn't mean that it is.
.NET.
.NET developers. I'm not talking about which is more 31337, I am talking about which one will find more steady income and have less trouble when they need to change jobs.
Perhaps if you put your troll's club down long enough to take a look at sourceforge, you would notice most of the newer open source applications for Windows are being developed in
It won't take over the Internet, but it has been well accepted and is easy to use.
I wonder though, with all this FUD, if anyone can produce real numbers showing which is in more demand in the workplace: Linux developers vs
What happens if someone discover a flaw in the CLR ?
Do we have to buy another processor ? or flash another CLR ?
Placing anything on a processor is a *pretty* stupid idea.
As you mentioned, newer Windows applications are being written in .NET, and you go on to ponder what the demand is. I don't know of any numbers, but I'd imagine .NET developers would be in all sorts of demand with respect to developing on any Windows platform, after all, .NET is the new API which replaces Win32.
.NET, and it's pretty sad that it is. I'm not a Microsoft fanboy, but anyone who cannot recognise the Official API of future Windows development is in serious trouble (if they intend on developing future Windows applications, that is). As you said, .NET isn't going to take over the Internet (who said it would in the first place?), but it will take over ALL Windows development.
.NET, however I highly suspect I dreamt it.
I agree that there is all sorts of FUD flying around about
All that said, I seem to remember reading about how Microsoft was dropping
Clippy turns you off.
A drm hardware dream.
I assume FBGA is a typo for FPGA. This thing sounds suspiciously similar to one of those standard FPGAs with a built-in ARM7 core.
It actually sounds like quite a nice little embedded system, a kind of grown-up Basic STAMP. I expect that the .net VM is in ROM; on start-up the FPGA is probably bootstrapped from it. I wonder if it would be possible to replace it with a real operating system?
Isn't this exactly like the Java CPU that Sun was selling a few years back? And it was simply a close relative of the Lisp processors from the 80s.
C#, Java. .Net, J2EE. CLR, JVM. .NET CPU, Java CPU. So should we expect Microsoft to simply repeat everything that Sun did with Java? If so, wake me up when they declare they're going to release CLR under an open source license.
http://www.clifford.at/bfcpu/bfcpu.html This piece of hardware is tres cool, as it implements the _complete_ set of Brainf*ck instructions as native instruction set.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
Personally as someone who's long developed Windows Win32/MFC code (in C++) and is now moving to C# .NET stuff, I'm finding .NET an absolute doddle.
.NET, whenever I've wanted to do something, I've looked at the classes, thought "How would it be sensible to do this", and 9 times out of 10 it works perfectly
let's face it - MFC and Win32 are old and have been cobbled together, seemingly at random over the lifespan of the whole Windows family, meaning nothing feels like it's ever really been designed
One function returns a colour, another function needs a colour. Oh dear, one uses some kind of int, the other a struct (oh and another some kind of class) - lets bog down our code with lots of conversion functions - Most of the time the sensible obvious approach to a task is the wrong one.
So far in
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!
What of things I've read saying that .net will be the default api in windows longhorn?
As a former DOS programmer, I can tell you that when Microsoft wants to get rid of an API, they're quite good at it. If they want to do it, win32 will be dead before the end of the decade, just like dos.
It's been a long time.
This has been available for a long time with open access to the design from Sun as the picoJava CPU core. It was not an economically viable CPU and I think this's one of the reasons why Sun released it.
Banu
Ahnetkpu? Is this an Elder God?
It is an entirely different situation.
They can't just kill backwards compatibility now since it is the one big reason to stay with Windows. Most businesses are evaluating other OS now and if the change to a new Windows version requires rewriting all your programs (I know they will probably implement a compatibility layer but we know how well that worked in the past) then they might just as well rewrite them on Linux (or some other OS that 'lacks' MS Security Features (TM) ).
Linux is not Windows
I can't imagine .NET is going to take over the Internet, but ASP.NET is a very nice platform for writing web apps. OK they will probably run on IIS, unless you use Mono, but it is a big step up from the scripting languages approach of basically just printing out the web page.
It gives some nice abstraction to writing web pages, you don't have to worry about hand crafting every bit of HTML that is going out to the browser (although you can if you want or need to), and can deal with the concepts, objects and events.
.NET does little that is new, Java was doing much of it first, but for writing web apps it is pretty simple and powerful and has good development software. We are moving to it at work because it makes us more productive.
Although I agree with you that it isn't the case to troll everything that has "microsoft" into it, I think that an high income isn't the first requirement for someone that foreseek freedom of choice and information (why develop Free Software, else?).
The fact that 85% of the computer world use MS systems doesn't mean that it's the best thing to do. Still, things are (really) slowly changing. Maybe I'll live the day when the market share between MS and *nixes 'll be 50%-50%... and that would mean real competition, not just "smithe the infidel with teh big hammer" as almost everyone on both sides tries to do (often don't understanding really what's right to "fight" for).
42.
Looks like this idea's been around for god knows how long ... So much for innovation, we seem to be going backwards here ?.
This is a plug , but I've been working on aQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
It's not like there isn't anything like this for Java. The first that comes to mind is the TINI-board, from Dallas. There was another one with a more arcane Java-implementation, but less resource-overhead (Can't remember the name right now..). And those are just the ones I worked with. There should be others. So nothing unique here, except maybe that this is the first of this kind of firmware for .Net
So "used" cases that used "unused" could break, though older compilers in essence used "unused" to mean both "used" and
Check out the company website, and Google them. I just did and it turns up that this company was founded on Oct10.2k4ce by Mark Phillips. A Google turned up... the company website, the original submission, and a couple other press releases. this is their only product, and they made it in two months.
Microsoft's only connection with them is that Mark Phillips guy, who, when googled investigatively, appears to have founded A Dot Corporation in Apr.2k3ce and they were involved in... SPOT Watch technology and claim microsoft to be a business partner (spotcorporation.com).
So is Mark Phillips using his work with microsoft's SPOT developer team to create something to market under a different name? Both companies list only Mark Phillips as founder and, in fact, confirmed employee, although one site listed A Dot as having 24 employees.
Yeah, so that's funny...
So?
.net...)
Yes, that'll suck for anyone who's currently working with any API it replaces, but that's progress - technology moves on. Besides, the jobs won't disappear overnight, there are still openings for COBOL programmers, for example (there's even a COBOL binding for
I still don't see the big deal. One of the most frequent criticisms I hear on tech sites of Windows is the cruft that's accumulated due to always maintaining backward compatibility. Surely removing that cruft by removing the backward compatibility would be a good thing?
Not that it'll happen very quickly; there's simply far too much software available using the Win32 API to simply drop support. People would either not upgrade, or (worse) move to an alternative platform.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
It boggles my mind, every time someone comes out with a bytecoded language in order to attempt to achieve hardware independence, someone comes along and creates hardware to execute it! Thus defeating the original purpose.
Of course people see the need for hardware acceleration because interpreted or even JIT compiled bytecode languages are always going to be slower than precompiled native binaries.
> But does it run Linux?
The real question is "does it run Mono?"
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
Say what you want about .NET (I disagree with u completely BTW), but the IDE KICKS Hardcore BUTT! I have yet to see something better the VS .NET 2003 for development. Quite a few people have bought into .NET and if I have a choice between C++ and C#, I pick C# thanks....but then I was born and raised on C and Java anyway....
My Favourite Meme
I've seen .Net moving in quite heavily in the manufacturing world. This is one sector that MS has a strong hold on simply because there are so few people that want to sit down and write the hundreds of communications drivers, etc needed to create manufacturing data systems. Or maybe because once you buy a manufacturing system you don't want to switch brands until you get back out of the hole with it :P .Net SDK's, and a lot of internal application programming seems to be moving that way also. .Net was the available choice (unless you consider VB6 as a valid choice...*shudder*) and despite the fact that the only other competing product was written in C++ (we think) we also managed to turn out a more efficient server (not that I don't think i could have made it even faster in C++, I just expected the other company's to suck that badly :P).
.Net, as the valid choices are generally VB6 vs VC++ vs some flavor of .Net vs Excel VBA (you think I'm kidding). The few other languages the make it onto the plate are generally as bad as VB6, so I prefer to leave them unmentioned. About the only time I have seen it go beyond this is the few times I introduced the power of bash scripting something on my laptop's preferred partition (ie, not windows) ;).
:)
A lot of the products I have seen (both data collection and warehouse-type) are moving to
The last major project I did was:
1 part config client and 1 part server
"please maximize uptime"
"please maximize scanning capabilities"
"please correct our last 9 months of errors and get it on the shelf in 2 months or less"
A lot of internal app's get written in
Ok, enough rambling
-T
Whee signature.
It's an ARM CPU, not a .NET CPU.
It loads ".NET Embedded" from firmware.
This is like saying an iPaq has a WindowsCE CPU.
Jobserve seems to disagree with you:
search for ".net", any job type - 1629
search for "c", any job type - 1499
search for "java", any job type - 3009
search for "c++", any job type - 2300
Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 15.6). Guess I'd better explain then that jobserve.com is a major UK-based jobs web site, catering to a large number of industries. While the jobs advertised are mainly in the UK, they also cover parts of Europe, and have a site dedicated to jobs in Australia. How's that slashcode, better?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
.Net (WTF - extremely "ungooglable" name, BTW) is young and peppy... Wait 5-10 years for it to mature though.
Read this paper about how many hoops you have to go through to get a decent interpreter for .NET. And it blatantly ignores the _Main() x86 native code that's in the .exe files.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Yeah riiiiight have you ever seriously looked at the spec of these 'java chips'? They are not as advanced as Sun may have you believe..
.NET chip....
* No floating point 16-bit int instead of 32 bits.
* All types (byte, short, char, int and boolean) use 2 bytes,
though byte and short arrays use 1 byte per element.
* Only one-dimensional arrays (can use the index to simulate a 2-D array.)
* Single byte ASCII strings instead of two byte Unicode
* Only a single thread available, though a timer allows for
scheduling of multiple tasks. (Plus the VP objects run independently)
* No interfaces, though sub-classing of an abstract base class is allowed.
* A subset of the core libraries is available. (Remember also that
all linked classes must be downloaded with the program and fit into
the 32kb of memory.)
* No garbage collection. All objects created will last for the
duration of the program.
Compare that to this
* 384K of SRAM, single cycle access
* 27 MHz ARM7TDMI
* FBGA chip form
* ~450,000 instructions per second
* 4MB non volatile flash
* 1.8-volt core, 3.3-volt I/O
* 32768 Hz real-time clock
* 32-pin pinout, including 24 GPIO ports multiplexed with other functions (8 VTU ports, dual serial ports, SPI, and USB port)
* SPI and I2C interfaces
and its multithreaded, too
I was a Sun fanboy until I noticed that Apple were doing better UNIX systems for cheaper. I still like the W1100z and W2100z though :-)
What you pasted for JVM was the engine specs and for this thing was the CPU/Embedded specs.
The guys haven't really given out WHAT the "embedded.net" runs - looks like it's about the same as what the embedded JVM runs (not the Java "chip"). It's not a ".NET" chip first off and secondly it's almost the same as those "jvm" embedded (ie 400k sdram for what I have) in features. Multi-threading is not really multi-threading either, it is a kind of co-operative environment.
It's really not the big badass ".NET" at all , despite the name and the endorsment.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
TINI
Its been around for a while.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Read about it and some other Java chips here.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait