What's in a node?- RE: talking about where processor or memory goes and why.

[Charles Steinkuehler]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Oren Beck wrote:
> Well- why not have some ubergeeken amongst us whack together
> some prototypes?

I'll bring the mask layouts, if you bring the fab equipment capable of
running a fairly recent DRAM process.

Oh...and I'll probably use just about *ANYTHING* other than the 808x
family, which I've always viewed as an abomination (the better mousetrap
doesn't always win).  The 6502, 6809, and several other lesser well
known parts (harvard architecture DSP like cores, stack-based machines
like the Harris RTX series and Atmel MARC4, or even PIC's for god's
sake) are IMHO all better suited for such a machine.  :)

If you're not really serious about pushing the state of the art, you can
roll an array of CPU flavor(s) of your choice and a respectable amount
of memory in modern FPGAs.  You can squeeze in a pretty decent number of
processors (depending on the core, of course...you get more 6502's than
32-bit MIPS cores!), where this really suffers vs. a custom solution is
the memory.  The biggest FPGA's are currently toping out around 1 MByte
of internal block memory.

...but then who's ever going to need more than 640KB, anyway?!?  :)

- --
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFGuPzeLywbqEHdNFwRAtiEAJ48zmhUCILcHGTdiuAexEMfrgvQ3gCcDeFs
QTDlTOmfFHTs7wIVaE367zk=
=kN43
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----