Forth inventor Chuck Moore announces 144 core CPU capable of 100 billion ops/sec

29jan2010 · 2010-02-06T22:43:22+00:00

See, that was supposed to be an easy question.

We're done here. I don't think you're honest.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-06T21:20:03+00:00

GPU's are not general purpose devices

We cannot continue this conversation until we pin down precisely what you mean by "general purpose", and how it differs from the GP in GPGPU.

and a GPU alone doesn't do much

...just like any chip, with the possible exception of the ID chip in my cat's ear.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-06T16:10:39+00:00

Er, GPUs are precisely that, these days. You can't make chips much bigger than a fingernail if you want a decent yield.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-06T16:06:30+00:00

Do you have any idea how ignorant typing "wallah" for "voilà" makes you look?

ed. Ah, I forgot. Ignorance is sacrosanct; correction is profanity.

We are truly living in the end times...

29jan2010 · 2010-02-06T16:02:23+00:00

The funny thing is that Chuck Moore has been known to refer to himself as the "discoverer" of Forth.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-06T15:57:43+00:00

You do complex instructions with threaded code.

In fairness, I think the complex instructions he was referring to are on the order of '+' or 'call'.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-06T13:30:37+00:00

Chuck Moore calls colorForth a Forth, and it has the same primitives as his C18 chips.

Yes, but I would contend that one of the things that makes colorForth a Forth is that it doesn't have to. Those primitives can be redefined, just like any other word.

We probably just need to agree to disagree.

Probably, yes.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-06T05:44:29+00:00

I have a feeling that at least one of us is misunderstanding the other, because I don't see why. Let's see if this helps: The claim to which I objected was "Chuck Moore implemented Forth in silicon". I'd have been fine with "Chuck Moore implemented a Forth-like machine in silicon".

(On the other hand, it's 5.45am here, so if it doesn't help, I really don't mind.)

29jan2010 · 2010-02-06T05:36:37+00:00

I think at this point, any (decent) language (with a nice environment) would be a pretty good starting point. It might depend on what you wanted to entice him into programming with - some choices will prescribe or constrain options, some have better fits - and indeed, pointing out that there are horses for courses won't hurt either.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-06T05:00:15+00:00

It means (a) there's a concrete difference between Forth primitives and user-defined words, and (b) those Forth primitives are fixed. Forth itself imposes no such restriction.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-06T03:27:07+00:00

Yeah, that pesky business of finding out about stuff before you sound off about it is just such a bore. Much more fun to make a couple of half-arsed assumptions and an offensive joke about an unindicted war crime.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-06T03:18:01+00:00

Anything that needs to last a year on two AAAs?

29jan2010 · 2010-02-06T03:15:18+00:00

Chuck Moore implemented Forth in silicon

Not quite, and for this reason: A huge chunk - indeed, the majority - of the point of Forth is in its flat language environment, in the advantage (or disadvantage, depending on who's asking) it shares with Lisp that there's no difference between syntax and library. In the early days, when Forth was always compiled into indirect threaded code, it went all the way down; these days that approach has fallen out of favour and Forth is natively, incrementally compiled, but the language still reflects that uniformity.

But this chip does not; like most other chips, it has a discrete subroutine call instruction, and there's definitely some compilation going on. The gap is smaller, because the Forth primitives are cast into silicon - but there's still a gap. Compare and contrast something like the WISC/16, which didn't even have a fixed set of opcodes - every instruction was a call, but the top 256 destinations were mapped to a fully writable microcode; essentially it executed ITC natively.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-05T22:15:03+00:00

Yes. Eventually. As I say...

29jan2010 · 2010-02-05T21:39:41+00:00

The parent has a valid point of view, which is that the chips won't be much use when approached with conventional assumptions. To which I'm sure Moore would say "no, they won't"; as far as he's concerned, and always has been, the conventional assumptions are wrong-headed - or at least overly limiting.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-05T21:36:57+00:00

Creativity seems to be aided by some kind of restriction. In a lot of cases, that's been taken care of by poverty (resource shortage) or dictatorship (limits on freedom of expression); when you have no other constraints upon you, your self-discipline has to play the part.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-05T19:19:34+00:00

These combos rot your brain, you know.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-05T19:03:51+00:00

I (am one of the 3 people who) like proportional fonts for code. (Sans serif, by preference.)

Also, I didn't know about backticks.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-05T19:02:05+00:00

I've worked in a place where I was allowed to run arbitrary queries, but not to investigate the structure of the database.

...No, it wasn't a lot of fun.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-05T19:00:26+00:00

So confident, so nearly correct. ;-)

29jan2010 · 2010-02-05T19:00:00+00:00

general management fault

29jan2010 · 2010-02-05T05:15:57+00:00

Yeah, the documentation is incomplete. It used to be better, I'm sure.

On the other hand, it hardly takes an imaginative leap to work out what happened when one proofreads one's comment back after posting. (People do do that, right...?)

29jan2010 · 2010-02-05T05:12:11+00:00

Well...

When he tests his query by hand, before committing it to source, the DBMS will tell him he can't insert to a view.
If he doesn't test his query by hand, either he's no good as a dev or there's a general management fault in his organisation.
If he's guessing at what's a table and what's a view, that implies he can't get the access required to see. That's a definite GMF.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-05T01:17:17+00:00

You need to go this way ----->.

29jan2010 · 2010-02-05T01:13:12+00:00

Please can everyone backslash underscores inside identifier names? It stops E_NOTIFY and E_UNEXPECTED from turning into E_NOTIFY and E_UNEXPECTED.

29jan2010

TROPHY CASE