[dewster]

Multi-core F18A technology, each of which is a simple 18 bit processor. IMO, anything less than 32 bits (with internal 33 x 33 = 65 bit multiply) falls into the primitive category abyss.

Moore is an incredible salesman, I'll give him that.

[kick]

Moore is an awful salesman but a skilled technologist, you have it reversed. He only recently got buyers for his recent processors, and he doesn't handle sales in any of his business endeavors.

Also, the chips he made before GA were 32-bit. He deemed it unnecessary, and the GA chips run miles around them.

[dewster]

I meant that he's a genius at the whole stack machine / language shaman thing.

32 bits are unnecessary?!? I suppose a 18 bit machine would run a lot "faster" than a 32 bit machine given certain data sets and loads, but I wouldn't want to do any audio DSP with it.

[kick]

Actually, audio DSP might be a bit better on them, too. They have the best power/instruction ratio on the entire planet, and given each chip has 144 entire computers on it, audio DSP should be no problem for them.

[dewster]

"...and given each chip has 144 entire computers on it..."

Entire computers? What decade is it again?

[7thaccount]

Not just a processor, but peripherals as well.

[kick]

This!

A core and a computer aren't the same, and while Intel processors have multiple cores, sometimes many, they don't have multiple computers within.

http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB002-100...

COMPLETE SYSTEMS: We refer to our chips as Multi-Computer Systems because they are, in fact, complete systems. Supply one of our chips with power and a reset signal, and it is up and running. All of our chips can load their software at high speed using a single wire that can be daisy chained for multiple chips; if desired, most can be bootstrapped by a simple SPI flash memory. Application software can be manufactured into a custom chip for a modest cost to further simplify overall system design. External memory is not required to run application software, but our larger chips have sufficient I/O to directly control external memory devices if desired.

Contrast this with a Multi-Core CPU, which is not a computing system until other devices such as crystals, memory controllers, memories, and bus controllers have been added. All of these things consume energy, occupy space, cost money, add complexity, and create bottlenecks. Most multi-core CPUs are designed to speed up conventional operating systems, which typically have hundreds or thousands of concurrent processes, by letting a handful of process execute in parallel as opposed to only one. They are not, typically, designed for significantly parallel processing, and they are even less well suited for simple applications than are their less expensive single-core progenitors.

It's meant for hyper-parallel applications, unlike Pentium cores.