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From: Neil Franklin <neil@franklin.ch.remove>
Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art
Subject: Re: OT: Spamfighting (was: All YOUR Romantic Needs -
 Relationship101.com 9857)
Date: 22 Feb 2001 20:21:20 +0100
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ppunk@damthatspam.chello.nl (Peter Punk) writes:

> On 20 Feb 2001 21:02:52 +0100, Neil Franklin <neil@franklin.ch.remove> provoked
> the following text:
>
> >Cool. An FPGA C64 clone. URL?
> >
> ><dreaming>
> ></dreaming>
>
> Oh no! No Amiga clones! LOL!!!
> Next thing we know is she's gonna make a single-chip ZX Spectrum!

Sounds also interesting.


> >And as FPGA code is code just like C code, there is already talk of
> >open source hardware designs.
>
> Like the TransMeta CPU?

Not at all.


Transmeta is essentially the return [1] of microcode. That is an very
primitive processor that is specialised in running emulators.

Software for such an chip is an emulator program, for example an x86
emulator. Designing is writing such an program.

[1] Most [2] of the IBM 360 (and 370) mainframes used that technique. IBM
actually sold various price/performance emulators running their particular
360 emulations!

[2] all 360s exept the 360/44 and 360/91. These two were actual hardware
360 (only subsets) that used trapping techniques to emulate the rest
of the instructions. Same trick as an 386 or 486SX trapping the 387 or
487SX instructions when no FPU chip was in the PC.


OTOH an FPGA is an regular array of programmable universal logic elements
surrounded by many short bits of "wire" that can be connected together
with switch transistors.

Software is an bit array the activates the proper switches and logic
configurations. Designing is really selecting logic element
configurations and then witing them, i.e. real electrical engineering.


> >P.S. I have just this January started an project to FPGA clone the
> >1970s PDP-10 mainframe: http://neil.franklin.ch/Projects/PDP-10/
>
> Looks impressive, but i don't understand any of it :-)))

I expect it to be unreadable unless one has either PDP-10 or FPGA
knowlege. And I suspect one needs both :-).


> >That it is. These are interesting times we live in.
>
> But the best times were the early 80's!

For PDP-10s that was already the time of dying. 1970s were the strong
days. I am aiming for the KI-10 model that dominated 1969-1975.


--
Neil Franklin, neil@franklin.ch.remove http://neil.franklin.ch/
Hacker, Unix Guru, El Eng FH/BSc, Sysadmin, Roleplayer, LARPer, Mystic