[orbat]

That description reminds me of GreenArrays' (https://www.greenarraychips.com) Forth chips that have 144 cores – although they call them "computers" because they're more independent than regular CPU cores, and eg. each has its own memory and so on. Each "computer" is very simple and small – with a 180nm geometry they can cram 8 of them in 1mm^2, and the chip is fairly energy-efficient.

Programming for these chips apparently a bit of a nightmare though. Because the "computers" are so simple, even eg. calculating MD5 turns into a fairly tricky proposition as you have to spread out the algorithm to multiple computers with very small amounts of memory, so something that would be very simple on a more classic processor turns into a very low level multithreaded ordeal

[adastra22]

Worth noting that the GreenArrays chip is 15 years old. 144 cores was a BIG DEAL back then. I wonder what a similar architecture compiled with a modern process could achieve. 1440 cores? More?

[markhahn]

those weren't "real" cores. you know what current chip has FUs that it falsely calls "cores"? that's right, Nvidia GPUs. I think that's the answer to your question (pushing 20k).

[adastra22]

In what way were they not “real” cores? They had their own operating environment completely independent of other cores. GPU execution units on the other hand are SIMD--a single instruction stream.

[orbat]

How are GA144's nodes / "computers" not real cores? They're fully independent, each has its own memory (RAM and ROM), stacks, and registers, its own I/O ports and GPIO pins (some of them), and so on.

https://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB003-11...

[markhahn]

it's a very interesting product - sort of the lovechild of a 1980s bitsliced microcode system optimized for application-specific pipelines (systolic array, etc).

do you know whehter it's had any serious design wins? I can easily imagine it being interesting for missile guidance, maybe high-speed trading, password cracking/coin mining. you could certainly do AI and GPUs with it, but I'm not sure it would have an advantage, even given the same number of transistors and memory resources.

[orbat]

I think they were more meant to minimize power use than be very performant. Honestly no clue how widely the GA144 is used in real-world applications, but I guess that since the company still exists they have to be getting money from somewhere

[dwattttt]

Calling all TIS-100 fans