Dual-stack (Forth) processors

[Bengt Larsson]

In comp.arch, "Martin Euredjian" <0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net> wrote:

Jon Harris wrote:

Ctrl-End. I guess it's 2 key strokes, and you still have to click within
the message, though Tab will also move the focus from the tree view to the
preview pane.

If focus is in the preview pane just "End" will get you to the bottom.

Sorry for the off-topic nature of this. I scan-through and read hundreds of
emails and newsgroup posts per day and just a few extra keystrokes can be a
pain in the you-know-what.

Well, Outlook Express is crap as a newsreader. Most newsreaders have a
"single-read key" key that pages through a message, then skips to the
next unread one at the end. This is why you don't see users of other
newsreaders complain so much about skipping some text. Trimming the
quotes is a good thing, nevertheless.

Outlook Express is crap as a newsreader. I could go on and on about
it, but I bet you didn't know.

 

[Martin Euredjian]

Bengt Larsson wrote:

Outlook Express is crap as a newsreader. I could go on and on about
it, but I bet you didn't know.

What's a good newsreader?



--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin Euredjian

To send private email:
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[Bengt Larsson]

In comp.arch, "Martin Euredjian" <0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net> wrote:

Bengt Larsson wrote:

Outlook Express is crap as a newsreader. I could go on and on about
it, but I bet you didn't know.

What's a good newsreader?

That's a good question. Outlook Express has a pretty good interface,
but it isn't very good for scanning newsgroups quickly.

You may try the reader I use - Agent - you can find it at
www.forteinc.com. It's payware, but there is a 30 day free trial.

Unfortunately, Agent is a kind of opposite to Outlook Express, not
easy to learn, hard to get into. It's also limited in some ways. But
it does the "core newsreading" extremely efficiently.

I have tried almost all newsreaders available for Windows, and a
number of them for Unix. I haven't found the be-all and end-all.

If you want more information, you may want to check the newsgroup
news.software.readers.

 

[Jeff Fox]

"Martin Euredjian" <0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net> wrote in message news:<TTdZb.27845$9j2.1957@newssvr25.news.prodigy.com>...

Davka wrote:

Is there a community that is actively involved in discussing and/or
developing FPGA-based Forth chips, or more generally, stack
machines?

Davka asked about FPGA-based Forth chips. He has a right to have
an interest and ask a question, but he probably also expected some
of the usual flame bait in response.

I've thought about this in terms of internal use. As much as I like FORTH
(used it extensively in the 80's and early 90's) the reality seems to be
that C is the way to go.

The subject of the question was about FPGA-based Forth chips.
The reason from the question is that they are a good fit to FPGA
as they can provide higher performance with fewer gates than
many other designs, especially when used as the control processor
to interface to other user defined custom circuitry in an FPGA
application.

Given that Davka obviously knows this already and is interested in
using some language on an application that may include a dual-stack
(Forth) processor in an FPGA he really didn't ask if he should just
give up the idea because it is not what everyone else is doing.

Given the context it seems strange to suggest that 'the reality
seems to be that C is the way to go.' That sounds rather strange
since he asked about a particular type of FPGA-based dual-stack
(Forth) chip. Are you suggesting that C would be a better choice
for the software for this type of chip than Forth? What C
compiler will produce better code for a Forth chip than Forth?
I realize that you were probably just trying to flame Davka and
trying to change the subject from asking about where people can
discuss the subject of dual-stack (Forth) processors and make
it clear that you don't like that subject broached in any of
the above newsgroups. But after all, it wasn't cross posted
to c.advocacy etc.

If you stick to the technical details that Davka was interested
in you find lots of examples of very small dual-stack processors
implmented in programmable gate array that had very high performance.
In 1988 it was 50 mips on a 32-bit processor in PGA when Intel was
selling full custom VLSI 80286 that got substantially less. And
today's FPGA are pretty cheap, fast, and/or big compared to what
was available sixteen years ago.

It's a matter of the business equation more than a technical
rationalization.

What do you know about Davka's business plans regarding his
use of dual-stack processors in FPGA? I suspect that you know
nothing about it and were just trying to change the subject to
popularity. I think he asked because he was interested in technical
details on the subject, not in lectures about your idea of
business equations or popularity comparisons.

FORTH is very cryptic for non-FORTH programmers and

Duh. (insert programming language name) is very cryptic for non-
(insert same programming language name) programmers. C is very cryptic
for non-C programmers. The average person is not a programmer and
can't read C programs. Should we conclude that because that is
what the majority of people think of C that everyone who uses C
should stop using a language that is cryptic to people who haven't
learned it? Duh.

(APL is so cryptic looking to non-APL programmers that it
looks like it came from outer space! Take over the world? ;-)

finding skilled FORTH programmers is not as easy as C programmers.

Duh. Finding skilled (insert language name) programmers is not
as easy as (insert other language name) programmers. The keyword
there is skilled. Sure, not all programmers in a given language
are really the ones who are labeled skilled. The qualifier makes
the statement language independent.

It is easier to find C programmers than programmers of languages
used by smaller numbers of people. Duh. But after all this thread
was about Davka's interest in finding people who could rationally
discuss the design and use dual-stack processors implemented in FPGA.
I don't think that this group of people is going to be larger than
the group that includes skilled and unskilled C programmers. It
really has nothing to do with what he asked about.

And,
while productivity with FORTH can be substantially greater than with C or
Assembly,

It is interesting that you think Forth can be substantially more
productive than C or assembly. Not everyone would agree with you,
but in the context of the software that Davka will use with a
dual-stack processor in FPGA it certainly seems like a quite
reasonable statement. Maybe you were just baiting.

you are, eventually, forced to contend with code maintenance,
reuse and changes in design teams (Oh, no! Our only FORTH guy left!).

Davka may be only guy involved in his work, he may have a team of
people, and after all he only asked were to find people who
knew about the subject. He didn't ask if Forth was more popular
than C in systems written in C or with programmers who prefer C.

Maintenance is generally more of an issue of code quality than
anything else. There are plenty of unskilled programmers who
have written, and will continue to write, code that is hard
to maintain because it was baddly written in the first place.
That certainly includes C and Cobol and assembler and Forth
or whatever. As you say not all programmers are skilled
programmers.

Well written Forth programs are as easy to maintain as any other
well written programs. Some consultants who use Forth complain
that they have to keep it a secret because if they tell the
client that their well written program was written in Forth they
won't be called in to do the maintenance, even the non-technical
vice-president can read and modify their code if they know it
is written in something as easy as Forth. In the cases where
development 'productivity with Forth can be substantially greater
than with C or Assembly' any maintenance productivity comparison
would hopefully be similar. Of course there are always examples
of bad and unmaintainable code being written in any language.
Often unskilled programmers point to their own code as examples
of code that they wrote but other people had difficulty understanding
or maintaining. That is really a skill issue, or a managment issue
more than a language issue.

Best Wishes,
Jeff Fox

 

[Martin Euredjian]

Jeff Fox wrote:

Davka asked about FPGA-based Forth chips. He has a right to have
an interest and ask a question, but he probably also expected some
of the usual flame bait in response.
SNIP

Jeff,

Very good post. Please rest assured that my posts were made with the best
of intentions and "flame baiting" isn't even close to anything in my life.
I don't know which of the newsgroups you have read this from. I'm a
frequent participant in comp.arch.fpga and folks in that NG can tell you
that I'm not some kid getting off by starting controversy. Hell, I'm not
even a kid!

Anyhow. Maybe I got off topic with my detour into the business issues
involved. I'm sorry for that. I simply wanted to point out that there are
issues --business issues-- with regards to using Forth (or APL, or whatever)
in your work. Of course, nothing anyone says in these NG's is universally
applicable. It is left to the reader to decide whether or not to attach
validity and/or waste any time pondering what was said.

My own perspective is that, while I would love to use Forth for my work, I
have not found that the effort required jusifies the excercise. You can
almost say the same thing about assembler. You can't make such statements
without explaining why. My reasoning has to do with non-technical issues.
With the realities of business.

Regarding using C with an FPGA. Implementing something as simple as an 8051
core opens the door to using a large number of C compilers, tools, libraries
and capable programmers to write your control code.

If efficiency or execution speed (in the context of an FPGA) is paramount,
maybe a custom state-machine solution makes more sense. All of these
options have advantages and disadvantages, of course.



--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin Euredjian

To send private email:
0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net
where
"0_0_0_0_" = "martineu"

 

[Bernd Paysan]

Martin Euredjian wrote:

Regarding using C with an FPGA. Implementing something as simple as
an 8051 core opens the door to using a large number of C compilers,
tools, libraries and capable programmers to write your control code.

I wonder how someone can call the 8051 "simple". On my last task, we had
an 8051 (customer choice), which took about 3000LEs on an Altera FPGA
(I think that's even more than the 32 bit NIOS core takes ;-). Being
less than happy about that, I developed a simple Forth processor in a
few days (see www.b16-cpu.de), which did fit into about 600LEs. This is
a 16 bit processor, and much faster than the 8051 (but too late to
convince our customers). Recently, I stripped down a few not absolutely
necessary features such as fast divide and add, and fast mem-mem copy,
and now I'm at about 300LEs with the simplified version (for the
current project, where the customer wantet a "state machine").

I'm also working on a GCC backend, but it looks like GCC 3.5's SSA tree
representation will make the job much simpler to generate stack code
than going through the machine description aproach.

--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/

 

[Martin Euredjian]

Bernd Paysan wrote:

I wonder how someone can call the 8051 "simple". On my last task, we had
an 8051 (customer choice), which took about 3000LEs on an Altera FPGA
(I think that's even more than the 32 bit NIOS core takes ;-). Being
less than happy about that, I developed a simple Forth processor in a
few days (see www.b16-cpu.de), which did fit into about 600LEs.

I can buy a core today and have any 8051 code running in it tomorrow.
That's simple.

Even better. If I have a design that uses an external 8051 and need to
reduce BOM cost (and have FPGA resources) I can buy a core and fold the
processor and peripherals into the FPGA with little if any changes to the
8051 source code. Again, that's simple. And, BTW, I have exactly that
situation in one of our designs right now.

Simple isn't always smaller, faster, cheaper, less LE's, etc. "Simpler" is
defined by the application and the circumstances at hand.

Now, to address your 600 vs. 3000 LE comparison. Well, of course, if you
have a constraint that does not allow you the luxury of a 3000 LE processor
you have to look elsewhere. This might mean adopting something like a small
Forth CPU implementation (such as yours), a small state machine or simply
moving the processor off-chip. I mean, these days, for two bucks you can
put a tiny 25+ MHz (Cygnal and others) processor on a board.

So, yes, context is important, of course. In your context your choice made
perfect sense. No question about it.

Now, in these days of 6 million gate FPGA's it might be OK to trade device
utilization for time to market, flexibility, portability or other
parameters. Of course, each project is different. Each company is
different. Each designer is different and each circumstance is different.
You have to keep an open mind. That's all.

The other interesting choice today is V2 Pro. You might, for example, want
to use one to take advantage of the high-speed serial I/O capabilities and,
as a result, have free PowerPC processors ready to blast away.

BTW, your b16 looks to be very useful and compact.


--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin Euredjian

To send private email:
0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net
where
"0_0_0_0_" = "martineu"

 

[Jim Granville]

Martin Schoeberl wrote:

Is there a community that is actively involved in discussing and/or
developing FPGA-based Forth chips, or more generally, stack
machines?



Tha Java Virtual Machine is stack based. There are some projects to
build a 'real' Java machine. You can find more information about a
solution in an FPGA (with VHDL source) at: http://www.jopdesign.com/

It is sucessfully implemented in Altera ACEX 1K50, Cyclone (EP1C6) and
Xilinx Spartan2.

Martin

Does anyone know of efforts on a FPGA design for .NET bytecodes ?
Any numbers on how much resource it would need, and how that might
compare with a Java machine (or Forth one, for that matter..) ?

-jg

 

[Hal Murray]

What's annoying about bottom posting?

I have to scroll down to find out if you said anything interesting,
and then, half the time it's just a "me too" type comment. If I jump to
the end and discover that you didn't just say "me too", then I
have to go back to the top and search forward to find out if you
inserted something interesting rather than dumping everything at the end.


Top vs bottom posting is a perpetural source of flames on usenet.

In my opinion, the key is to trim the stuff that isn't directly
relevant to what you are responding to. After that, the top/bottom
part is lost in the noise and you will probably insert your text
in a reasonable place.


Top "posting" may be good in an office context where new people
get cc-ed and need the previous context. It gets pretty silly
in the usenet context when the discussion gets about 6 layers deep
and everybody has seen the first N-1 layers several times already.
(But then, it might help the poor sucker on a brain-damaged
news server that drops 50% of the articles. But he's probably
got other troubles.) On usenet, where I do have the context,
I find it very annoying.


The anti-top posters have many good sig lines. A few
examples:

A. Top posters.
Q. What is the most annoying thing on Usenet?

A. Because it destroys the natural flow of conversation.
Q. What's wrong with top posting ?

--
The suespammers.org mail server is located in California. So are all my
other mailboxes. Please do not send unsolicited bulk e-mail or unsolicited
commercial e-mail to my suespammers.org address or any of my other addresses.
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam.

 

[Randy Yates]

hmurray@suespammers.org (Hal Murray) writes:

What's annoying about bottom posting?

I have to scroll down to find out if you said anything interesting,
and then, half the time it's just a "me too" type comment. If I jump to
the end and discover that you didn't just say "me too", then I
have to go back to the top and search forward to find out if you
inserted something interesting rather than dumping everything at the end.


Top vs bottom posting is a perpetural source of flames on usenet.

In my opinion, the key is to trim the stuff that isn't directly
relevant to what you are responding to. After that, the top/bottom
part is lost in the noise and you will probably insert your text
in a reasonable place.


Top "posting" may be good in an office context where new people
get cc-ed and need the previous context. It gets pretty silly
in the usenet context when the discussion gets about 6 layers deep
and everybody has seen the first N-1 layers several times already.
(But then, it might help the poor sucker on a brain-damaged
news server that drops 50% of the articles. But he's probably
got other troubles.) On usenet, where I do have the context,
I find it very annoying.


The anti-top posters have many good sig lines. A few
examples:

A. Top posters.
Q. What is the most annoying thing on Usenet?

A. Because it destroys the natural flow of conversation.
Q. What's wrong with top posting ?

Perhaps the problem isn't top- or bottom-posting per se, but that the
quoting method used is inconsistent. If folks are careful to ensure
the "Tom says:" lines are properly maintained and use the same quote
character and indentation style, either posting style is fairly easily-
parsed, in my opinion.
--
% Randy Yates % "Remember the good old 1980's, when
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC % things were so uncomplicated?"
%%% 919-577-9882 % 'Ticket To The Moon'
%%%% <yates@ieee.org> % *Time*, Electric Light Orchestra
http://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr

 

[Uwe Kloß]

Martin Euredjian wrote:

The other interesting choice today is V2 Pro.

Could you give a link for that?

See you,
Uwe

 

[Martin Euredjian]

"Uwe Kloß" wrote:

The other interesting choice today is V2 Pro.

Could you give a link for that?

www.xilinx.com

Look at the Virtex II Pro family of devices.


--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin Euredjian

To send private email:
0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net
where
"0_0_0_0_" = "martineu"

 

[Davka]

"Martin Euredjian" <0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:5vkZb.27977$_76.2895@newssvr25.news.prodigy.com...

rickman wrote:
You had to go and say that, didn't you! This is being posted to the
Forth newsgroup and you will hear a few comments about this...

I realize that. No flames please. I have two decades of Forth
experience.
I'm from the days when you built your own computer from chips, wrote a
monitor, got Forth in there, wrote your own editor and then developed your
apps. I enjoy and love Forth. I truly do. I also love a language called
APL. I think it should rule the World.

Heh. Heheh.

I learned APL when I was a kid. I love it too. It taught me respect for
languages that
don't have an implicit order of operations.

I, too, have been programming in Forth for 20+ years. I wrote a multi-user
virtual
reality system that used byte-coded Forth to move virtual objects between
hosts
on the Internet. One of the things that struck me is that's it's less
awkward to write
long floating-point expressions multiplying sine and cosine terms in Forth
than it is in C. That's
why Forth came to mind as language for designing filters, etc. Also for
physical modeling
of musical instruments. It's easy to build up waveguides, etc into function
blocks that can
be strung together on the command line. *Everything* is better with an
interactive command
prompt.

The scripting language for the virtual reality objects was Forth, but the
Forth interpreter itself was written in
plain-vanilla C for portability. It ran fast enough (on Pentium 90s with
software-only 3D rendering!)
that the extra work of an assembler implementation wasn't worth it. I used
Forth exactly where
it made the most sense -- as a platform-independent VM-based object code --
and used C in a
way that reflected _its_ strengths. I chose the languages based on their
technical merits for a particular
application, something I'd like to see more programmers do.

The majority of the coding that I have done, both for pay and for
self-directed projects, has been
in C. I have been living in the same world of wanting portability,
maintainability and ease of finding programmers.

My goals for asking about DSP and Forth processors:

I'm teaching myself digital design and DSP.

My first substantial FPGA project was a minimal instruction set 16-bit Forth
processor. It simulates at 90+ MIPS
in a small Altera Cyclone part. It uses about 800 LEs.

Looking at the Stratix family, I see they're chock-full of optimized
multiply-and-accumulate blocks. Very nice!
I did a stint at Korg R&D years ago, working on a legendary unreleased synth
(the OASys). It was my intro
to state-of-the-art synthesis, using physical modeling of instruments. At
that time, I would have very much
liked to build/buy some hardware to experiment with at home, but the cost
was prohibitive. Now, I have
a real chance to build some music hardware.

And hardware for separating signals on the ham radio bands. And hardware to
develop multi-processing
ideas I've been toying with for years.

I'm going to experiment and read all the papers I can get my hands on and
pursue what's interesting, and if
something I do looks like it has better cost/performance than something on
the market, I'll look into commercializing
it.

After I have a project or two that I have physically realized, maybe someone
will give me a job doing FPGA design.

-Davka

 

[Martin Euredjian]

Davka wrote:

I learned APL when I was a kid. I love it too. It taught me respect for
languages that don't have an implicit order of operations.

Small World, isn't it!
The other thing that's nice about APL is the ability to abstract away from
the mechanics of programming and live within the problem domain.

My goals for asking about DSP and Forth processors:

I'm teaching myself digital design and DSP.
SNIP
My first substantial FPGA project was a minimal instruction set 16-bit
Forth
processor. It simulates at 90+ MIPS in a small Altera Cyclone part. It
uses about 800 LEs.

<SNIP>

state-of-the-art synthesis, using physical modeling of instruments.
SNIP
liked to build/buy some hardware to experiment with at home, but the cost
was prohibitive. Now, I have a real chance to build some music hardware.

Have you consider just doing it the FPGA way? I haven't stopped to think
about what's required but you can certainly create building blocks in
hardware (say, filters). Also, with the Virtex 2 Pro family you have the
ability to use the PowerPC processor/s as, well, processors and the rest of
the FPGA is available for custom peripherals (if you want to think of it
that way).

Of course, an optimized Forth machine would/could make it very interactive
and fun to play with. Is there an implementation of Forth for PowerPC?

Sounds like you are going to have some fun.



--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin Euredjian

To send private email:
0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net
where
"0_0_0_0_" = "martineu"

 

[Davka]

"Martin Euredjian" <0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:KX7%b.2619$6k.0@newssvr27.news.prodigy.com...

Davka wrote:

I learned APL when I was a kid. I love it too. It taught me respect
for
languages that don't have an implicit order of operations.

Small World, isn't it!
The other thing that's nice about APL is the ability to abstract away from
the mechanics of programming and live within the problem domain.

You're not the first fellow nerd that I've met who likes both Forth
and APL.

was prohibitive. Now, I have a real chance to build some music
hardware.

Have you consider just doing it the FPGA way? I haven't stopped to think
about what's required but you can certainly create building blocks in
hardware (say, filters). Also, with the Virtex 2 Pro family you have the
ability to use the PowerPC processor/s as, well, processors and the rest
of
the FPGA is available for custom peripherals (if you want to think of it
that way).

That's the plan. I've already put dozens of hours into learning the Altera
tool
and their chip families, so that's the way I will go initially. They have
their
own tiny RISC implementation (called NIOS), so if I don't do my own
processor,
I'll use that one.

The idea for the system architecture is to have a bunch of DSP modules of
various flavors
in the hardware which can be dynamically allocated by the software system
that manages them.

Of course, an optimized Forth machine would/could make it very interactive
and fun to play with. Is there an implementation of Forth for PowerPC?

I think it's called Open Firmware.

-Davka

 

[rickman]

Davka wrote:

"Martin Euredjian" <0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:KX7%b.2619$6k.0@newssvr27.news.prodigy.com...
Davka wrote:

I learned APL when I was a kid. I love it too. It taught me respect
for
languages that don't have an implicit order of operations.

Small World, isn't it!
The other thing that's nice about APL is the ability to abstract away from
the mechanics of programming and live within the problem domain.

You're not the first fellow nerd that I've met who likes both Forth
and APL.

was prohibitive. Now, I have a real chance to build some music
hardware.

Have you consider just doing it the FPGA way? I haven't stopped to think
about what's required but you can certainly create building blocks in
hardware (say, filters). Also, with the Virtex 2 Pro family you have the
ability to use the PowerPC processor/s as, well, processors and the rest
of
the FPGA is available for custom peripherals (if you want to think of it
that way).

That's the plan. I've already put dozens of hours into learning the Altera
tool
and their chip families, so that's the way I will go initially. They have
their
own tiny RISC implementation (called NIOS), so if I don't do my own
processor,
I'll use that one.

The idea for the system architecture is to have a bunch of DSP modules of
various flavors
in the hardware which can be dynamically allocated by the software system
that manages them.

I found a mention of a Forth for DSP called FROTH. I believe it is an
open source project, but the page does not seem to have been updated in
quite a while. Some of the other posters here may know more about it.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX

 

[jmdrake]

"Davka" <mygarbagepail@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<W01%b.2$mA3.6454@news.uswest.net>...

Heh. Heheh.

I learned APL when I was a kid. I love it too. It taught me respect for
languages that
don't have an implicit order of operations.

I, too, have been programming in Forth for 20+ years. I wrote a multi-user
virtual
reality system that used byte-coded Forth to move virtual objects between
hosts
on the Internet. One of the things that struck me is that's it's less
awkward to write
long floating-point expressions multiplying sine and cosine terms in Forth
than it is in C. That's
why Forth came to mind as language for designing filters, etc. Also for
physical modeling
of musical instruments. It's easy to build up waveguides, etc into function
blocks that can
be strung together on the command line. *Everything* is better with an
interactive command
prompt.

The scripting language for the virtual reality objects was Forth, but the
Forth interpreter itself was written in
plain-vanilla C for portability. It ran fast enough (on Pentium 90s with
software-only 3D rendering!)

Hmmm...that reminds me quite a bit of the "Metatopia" project.

http://metatopia.sourceforge.net/
http://www.immersive.com/

Do you still have the code? Are you doing anything with it?

My goals for asking about DSP and Forth processors:

I'm teaching myself digital design and DSP.

My first substantial FPGA project was a minimal instruction set 16-bit Forth
processor. It simulates at 90+ MIPS
in a small Altera Cyclone part. It uses about 800 LEs.

Cool. You should get this added to Jeff Fox's "Forth chips" page.

And hardware for separating signals on the ham radio bands. And hardware to
develop multi-processing
ideas I've been toying with for years.

Interesting. I do think that wireless processing are the "new frontier" for
hardware hackers. I have scene a packat modem implemented in FPGA. I'll
send you the link if you're interested. Jeff should be able to give you
some info of multi-processing MISC since that's something he's worked on
in the past and seems to be the focus of the latest Chuck work (25x).

Regards,

John M. Drake

 

[jmdrake]

"Martin Euredjian" <0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net> wrote in message news:<KX7%b.2619$6k.0@newssvr27.news.prodigy.com>...

Have you consider just doing it the FPGA way? I haven't stopped to think
about what's required but you can certainly create building blocks in
hardware (say, filters).

I wasn't aware that the "FPGA way" and a Forth processor were mutually
exclusive. Certainly Forth CPUs have had DSPs built into them before.

Of course, an optimized Forth machine would/could make it very interactive
and fun to play with. Is there an implementation of Forth for PowerPC?

Mops can generate PowerPC code. As for embedded PowerPC I was surprised
that I didn't see a SwiftX or VFX implementation on their websites
although both supported ColdFire.

Regards,

John M. Drake

 

[rickman]

jmdrake wrote:

"Martin Euredjian" <0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net> wrote in message news:<KX7%b.2619$6k.0@newssvr27.news.prodigy.com>...

Have you consider just doing it the FPGA way? I haven't stopped to think
about what's required but you can certainly create building blocks in
hardware (say, filters).

I wasn't aware that the "FPGA way" and a Forth processor were mutually
exclusive. Certainly Forth CPUs have had DSPs built into them before.

Of course, an optimized Forth machine would/could make it very interactive
and fun to play with. Is there an implementation of Forth for PowerPC?

Mops can generate PowerPC code. As for embedded PowerPC I was surprised
that I didn't see a SwiftX or VFX implementation on their websites
although both supported ColdFire.

I believe that is because both companies are reactive rather than
proactive. They port to a new platform when they are paid to do it.
They don't speculate on their own dime.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX

 

[jmdrake]

rickman <spamgoeshere4@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<403E4817.2E1B127A@yahoo.com>...

jmdrake wrote:

Mops can generate PowerPC code. As for embedded PowerPC I was surprised
that I didn't see a SwiftX or VFX implementation on their websites
although both supported ColdFire.

I believe that is because both companies are reactive rather than
proactive. They port to a new platform when they are paid to do it.
They don't speculate on their own dime.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

Right. I guess I'm surprised that there (apparantly) hasn't been a
request for PowerPC. Although I suppose it makes sense. Perhaps
ColdFire is a better fit for embedded systems price/performance
wise then PowerPC?

Anyway Forth Inc does have a PSC1000 port and Patriot Scientific
does have a PSC1000 core for use in FPGAs.

Regards,

John M. Drake