Lambda the Ultimate

FPGA's, Soft Cores and Custom CPU's.
started 11/20/2003; 1:36:07 PM - last post 11/27/2003; 8:52:24 PM

John Carter - FPGA's, Soft Cores and Custom CPU's.

11/20/2003; 1:36:07 PM (reads: 220, responses: 4)

Way back when when the moon was young and I was yet pretty....

There were several language specific CPU's. eg. the Symbolics Lisp Machine, the Pascal Microengine and no doubt others.

They seem to all die, crush to the wall by the Intel wave.

Now there is something new in the world. SoftCore CPU's deployed on FPGA's.

The world has changed again.

Will we see a new wave of language specific CPU's? There are several SoftCore JVM's already.

The prime lesson I learnt when I wrote a compile to byte-code compiler many years ago was... "Dream up a virtual machine that will make your job as a compiler writer the easiest. Then implement a byte-code interpretor for that."

Now we can let our imaginations run wild again... Dream up a CPU that would make our job as language designers easiest, then create a softcore to do that....

What dreams do you have?

Patrick Logan - Re: FPGA's, Soft Cores and Custom CPU's.

11/24/2003; 3:36:08 PM (reads: 155, responses: 0)

Here's another data point for this thesis...

Hardware/Software Co-Design with Neo-Smalltalk

More information is available in the OOPSLA proceedings, if you're an ACM member. I found very little else on the web so far.

Dave Herman - Re: FPGA's, Soft Cores and Custom CPU's.

11/26/2003; 4:38:33 PM (reads: 131, responses: 1)

My friend Greg Pettyjohn and I are always dreaming about building a little "pi-machine," with a massively parallel assembly language based on the pi-calculus or something like it. Never actually thought it through because I haven't the time, but it would be so much fun.

Daniel Yokomiso - Re: FPGA's, Soft Cores and Custom CPU's.

11/27/2003; 6:03:18 AM (reads: 129, responses: 0)

Something like Occam perhaps?

Dave Herman - Re: FPGA's, Soft Cores and Custom CPU's.

11/27/2003; 8:52:24 PM (reads: 120, responses: 0)

Sure -- the dream is more about building the platform and then playing with the interactions between the language and the platform, not so much about the design of the language itself. But there are lots of parallel languages that would make good candidates, I imagine.

And I want a pony.