<story><title>The J1 Forth CPU</title><url>http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/fpga-j1.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>avodonosov</author><text>Another Forth CPU by the Forth creator Chuck Moore and colleagues: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.greenarraychips.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.greenarraychips.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;. It&amp;#x27;s has 144 cores on a square centimeter chip.&lt;p&gt;Each core is equipped with its own little data and control Forth stacks, making it a fully fledged independent computer (that&amp;#x27;s why the more precise term is &amp;quot;multi-computer chips&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;multi-core&amp;quot;).&lt;p&gt;The cores talk to each other via communication ports. Writing to a port suspends the core until
the peer reads the value. And vice-versa.
(similar to channels in Go language).&lt;p&gt;Some other interesting properties (quoting the docs):&lt;p&gt;A computer can read from multiple ports [corresponds to Go&amp;#x27;s select] and can execute instructions directly from those ports.&lt;p&gt;FINE GRAINED ENERGY CONTROL: ... The read or write instruction is automatically suspended in mid-operation if the address [one or more of communication ports and I&amp;#x2F;O pin] is inactive, consuming energy only due to transistor leakage currents, resuming when the address becomes active.&lt;p&gt;NO CLOCKS: Most computing devices have one or more clocks that synchronize all operations. When a conventional computer is powered up and waiting to respond quickly to stimuli, clock generation and distribution are consuming energy at a huge rate by our standards, yet accomplishing nothing. This is why “starting” and “stopping” the clock is a big deal and takes much time and energy for other architectures. Our architecture explicitly omits a clock, saving energy and time among other benefits.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.greenarraychips.com&amp;#x2F;home&amp;#x2F;documents&amp;#x2F;greg&amp;#x2F;PB002-100822-GA-Arch.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.greenarraychips.com&amp;#x2F;home&amp;#x2F;documents&amp;#x2F;greg&amp;#x2F;PB002-100...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The J1 Forth CPU</title><url>http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/fpga-j1.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>MCRed</author><text>I loved Forth as a kid, I thought it was a great language to learn on.&lt;p&gt;I think that it&amp;#x27;s much better than BASIC for small projects and I would love to see someone make an arduino or BASIC STAMP type product (maybe kickstarter it?) with a little bit of an ecosystem.&lt;p&gt;I think a lot of people who are hardware focused but need to do some software would benefit, and software people who want to get into hardware would benefit too.</text></comment>