What the ----? Software-configurable processor?

[nFury8]

Link is here: (http://www.stretchinc.com/products_s5000.php)

Anybody heard or read about this company? (Stretch)

quote:

Stretch’s S5 engine unlocks the two following major RISC bottlenecks to provide an unparalleled level of performance:

1. Granularity of computations: Unlike typical RISC processors’ ALUs that perform low level operations such as shift, add, and multiply, the ISEF can execute thousands of operations as a single instruction; for example, a TripleDES instruction, a Color Space Conversion instruction, Image Resize instruction, and so on.
2. Data and compute bandwidth: The S5 uses 32 128-bit wide registers coupled with 128-bit wide access to memory to feed data to the ISEF at a bandwidth not available on any other processor.

Sounds too good to be true? But sounds sweet in any case. :D Hopefully not another crazy stunt like Infinium Labs. heheh.

[Mug Funky]

sounds like just one more level added to a RISC chip with some special architecture.

not too shabby, but basically just a RISC speedup when using their particular brand of code (ideally there should be a similar instruction grouping technique implemented for assembler or even fortran, which is still one of the major uses of RISC chips - scientific simulations using fortran on massively parallel systems with alpha RISC chips...)

[dimitrius]

aha, finally something I know plenty about...

they are saying their processor is a programmable logic chip. This is quite different from a processor like Pentium or AMD. They are using FPGA.

now programmable logic devices (PLDs) are basically a large collection of things like AND gates, OR gates, inverters, flip-flops, a little of RAM, a little of ROM and other elementary digital logic devices. They are Lego, you take a couple of gates and a few flip-flops and you tie them together and you get some binary logic function. This tieing together is usually done in a language called VHDL (visual hardware description language) but they are saying you can use C/C++ for this (seems to me to be a waste of time actually). Now the cool thing is that this architechture is capable of concurent and sequencial processing.

a-|-\
b-|-/----o1

c-|-\
d-|-/----o2

if a b c and d are inputs to 2 AND gates and o1 and o2 are the outputs (so o1=a AND b and o2=c AND d) if you implement this on the chip then given that you set a b c and d at the same time you will get o1 and o2 at the same time (about 1 nano second later).

a-|-\
b-|-/----o1---|-\
d---|-/----o2

and in this case it's sequencial - first you set a and b and you get o1 (which is a AND b), then you set d and you get o2 (which is o1 AND d).

this way you can build up complicated functions that do stuff in parallel or in series. In this way they seem to have built up a processor that has it's own command set and so on.

this processor is for embeded systems. that means not a PC but something like...uhm...microwave, dvd decoder, games-console, network devices or stuff like that. It also means that to use this processor you would need make your own supporting electronics (basically motherboard)

[Neo Neko]

Well this is slightly different. But IIRC Transmetta was the first to do this commercially many years ago. We got my mother a Sharp laptop with one of their carusoe chips. The thing has insane battery life. And at it's clockrate of 1Ghz can smoke the best Pentium M and mobile AMD cores for many tasks. All thanks to it's code morphing technology. Not to mention that it has it's own special Linux version Developed by Linus himself.

[nFury8]

Originally posted by Neo Neko
Well this is slightly different. But IIRC Transmetta was the first to do this commercially many years ago. We got my mother a Sharp laptop with one of their carusoe chips. The thing has insane battery life. And at it's clockrate of 1Ghz can smoke the best Pentium M and mobile AMD cores for many tasks. All thanks to it's code morphing technology. Not to mention that it has it's own special Linux version Developed by Linus himself.

If I'm not wrong you're refering to 'Crusoe'? I've read a while back about that little piece of ingenuity. Is that the one that's got some 'Just-in-time' compiler built in, or something like that? Can't remember exactly what it's called. Man, Transmeta's engineers must have shown Intel where it's at when marketing doesn't get in the way of serious engineering. But considering that perception is king in the realm of mass consumerism, that product must have sunk faster than titanic in the commercial market, another technological breakthrough falling victim to silly public ignorance.

[Neo Neko]

Actually the chip has not seen mass adoption. But it still exists, is being developed, and systems using it can be bought it you look around enough. People usually just parot the words Intel or AMD though.

[Joe Fenton]

I developed my own microprocessor back in college as a project a class required. Most of the folks in the class did it the way I did - use ROMs to translate the instruction into a set of control values that go to the logic in the CPU. The values in the ROM control when the instruction pointer advances, when the various registers are enabled to feed the ALU, what operation command the ALU is given, when to assert the external address bus and latches, etc. My CPU used EPROMs, but had I used EEPROMs, I could have made the CPU able to modify itself. That is what they are doing here.

Their RISC chip probably uses mask-ROM for the fixed instruction set that comes with every one of their RISC chips, but the parts of the instruction decoding that handles unimplemented instructions is now EEPROM. This allows customers to change the decoding of normally illegal instruction patterns. Nothing special beyond the fact that they are trying to push this on regular customers. All CPU makers allow the customer to make custom instructions, but they want you to make them ahead of time, then let them put those new instructions into mask-ROM with the rest so that the chip is cheaper (no EEPROM needed).

This looks like a pretty cool feature for those of us who like to do this level of hardware hacking. It won't penetrate the market much as the average customer really doesn't need this ability.

[midi]

I actually thought this was going to be a thread about the new nvidia card (from: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=2023&p=7):
That's right, NV4x includes a dedicated programmable video processor. The video processor is made up of an address, scalar, vector, and branch unit. The vector unit is a 16 way SIMD (a single instruction can operate on 16 different pieces of data at once) vector unit.

We don't have anything to test this thing with right now, but there is a whole lot this thing can do, including inverse 3:2 pulldown (conversion from interlaced TV format to progressive format better suited to computer monitors), colorspace conversion, gamma correction, MPEG 2 MPEG 4 WMV9 DiVX decoding and encoding, scaling, frame rate conversion, and anything else you'd like it to do for you.
If true it sounds a lot more adaptable than most hardware encoding cards/break out boxes I've seen so far.

[Doobie]

I think most processors now include a programmable layer. Intel started this to fix bugs after a small bug forced a big Pentium chip recall some years ago.

A programmable CPU will be inherently slower than a CPU hardwired with instructions. But, it may be more efficient to program a CPU than to have a a CPU run a program, if you know what I mean.

[GIR]

Programmable processors are nothing new, the R4300i in Nintendo's N64 was to a certain extent programmable (not sure about the RCP).