Item — HN Reader

A more appropriate title, and actually from the article, may be: "Weird and Innovative Chips".

Loved this post, anyways. I think it's important to look at radical and strange computing paradigms from the past, even if their DNA is not obviously in today's mainstream architectures.

2 comments

Yes, it's Great Microprocessors of the Past, Section Seven: Weird and Innovative Chips

(The "sections" seem like what are usually called chapters.) Seems like a really fascinating book!

Table of contents here: http://www.cpushack.com/CPU/cpu.html#tableofcontents

Would be interesting to see of there are newer examples of these weird chips. After all, the post is only from 2005(from copyright info at bottom of page).

The Tile chips and descendants made by Tilera and now Mellanox might fit the bill. They were noted in the press quite a few times back in 2010-2013 or so. They had 64 cores (sometimes other numbers) and could run Linux (or a bare metal environment). The idea was/is to have a grid of identical cores which can each talk at high speed with low latency to their four neighbors. The "outer" cores used their outward-facing bus to talk somewhat directly to DDR, Ethernet, and other ports. If a core in the middle wanted to do an Ethernet send, it had to send the data to its neighbor and so on until it reached a suitable "outer" core. And you could (perhaps even should) program these communications explicitly.

Linux and GCC support meant it was easy to program, but perhaps not easy to program well enough to beat x86 (which for most potential customers was probably the more relevant comparable, rather than the DSPs, FPGAs etc that Tilera suggested might be replaced).

Firepath? Not that weird perhaps.