forthday proceedings
peekay
sidelines .. and long lines on this saturday's
presentations, deliberations, discussions ?
and videos too :-))
MarkWills
foxchip
The Silicon Valley Forth Interest Group's Forth Day took
place yesterday at Stanford and was enjoyed by about the
same number of people as last year. It closely followed
the agenda currently listed at the forth.org website
which is pretty self-explanatory.
http://www.forth.org/svfig/next.html
There was old stuff, new stuff, evolutionary stuff, and
some innovative reports. Video were made and photos taken
that will be posted by SVFIG just like last year. There
was lots of interesting stuff. I won't comment on it all
but am willing to answer a few questions if I can. Dr.
Ting had an interesting approach to eForth in C.
The report on details of the Forth Foundation Library
should be of interest to a lot of c.l.f readers with
opinions about library projects as it seems to be
pretty mature at this point.
Leon did a step-by-step demonstration of how to
start a project, compile a system on a chip onto an
FPGA with a soft processor core, target compile an
application using Swift-X and get it all running
very quickly while answering questions and making
it all look easy.
IntellaSys and Green Arrays had quite a few people
attending and a few presenting. I already knew quite
a bit about the hearing enhancement project but it
was very nice to get a report and hear an actual
hearing aid device working. The algorithms used
are quite sophisticated and the previous prototype
which used TI DSP chips was nearly the size of a
laptop. Only a small fraction of processing power of
the S40 is used in the application so much of the
device doesn't consume power most of the time and
battery life can be maximized.
I talked about the Interactive Development Environment
for target chips in colorforth and reviewed a version
of the PWM Serial boot packet and/or neighbor
boot routine from a GA4 ROM that I had presented
earlier in the year to a small audience. I answered
the question I had posed for the reader about the
little optimization one could do on the routine I
had shown. I talked a little about blue words and
the design of the target compiler and IDE in
colorforth. I talked about the blog entry I had
made about optimizing your structures in Forth and
got a few nods from Chuck for comments about the
example code. I said I wanted to show more than
what was normally show to beginners when the subject
comes up.
I pointed out that when one sets up a path to a
target node in the colorforth IDE to interactively
talk to it as if it were running a Forth interpreter
with a command line that it had to be the smallest
such Forth system as it uses the minimal amount of
RAM and ROM. The minimum RAM/ROM footprint being
zero.
Chuck showed colorforth code for the Haypress Creek
board and using the IDE showed several small
applications using a small amount of the resources
on the board to generate video and display several
clocks in one of three fonts. Greg announced that
they would soon be releasing several versions of
colorforth with the compressed code, blue and grey
words, multiple fonts, watermarks, documentation,
and with a target compiler and software simulator
for each of the GA4, GA32, and GA144 chips. All
other OKAD application programs and the chip designs
themselves will of course be stripped from these
public colorforth releases.
Best Wishes
peekay
thank you
could you also elaborate on this talk please -
11:40 --- Discussion of a Native Forth for a NetBook - Sandy Bumgarner
"Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a cute, inexpensive, and complete
computer that runs only Forth? Ah, nothing but you, Forth, and the
hardware! Such a system could be built with an ASUS Eee PC and perhaps
other netbooks. Let's talk about it ..."
another question .. why is OKADII not available
to see, evaluate, use ? it sounds like such a
good tool .. is it limited to only GA chips ?
sxccaa.cal
also -
15:50 --- New Code on the New Hardware - Jeff Fox
Jeff will give a live interactive demonstration of the colorForth
tethered IDE as well as take up topics from his blog and show off this
year's chips.
and
17:00 --- Fireside Chat - Chuck Moore
foxchip
> could you also elaborate on this talk please -
>
> 11:40 --- Discussion of a Native Forth for a NetBook - Sandy Bumgarner
> "Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a cute, inexpensive, and complete
> computer that runs only Forth? Ah, nothing but you, Forth, and the
> hardware! Such a system could be built with an ASUS Eee PC and perhaps
> other netbooks. Let's talk about it ..."
No system was presented. Options for designing such a system
were reviewed. Suggestions included using eCos or parts of the
Linux kernel to provide USB host and TCP/IP stacks below a simple
Forth.
> another question .. why is OKADII not available
> to see, evaluate, use ? it sounds like such a
> good tool .. is it limited to only GA chips ?
Chuck says OKAD II is the best Forth application he has
yet seen. It does not use standard methods to compute
circuit performance, it uses proprietary methods that
allow circuits be designed that other less accurate
Spice based software says won't run at all. It runs
incredibly fast compared to Spice based calculations.
Publishing the source code would be publishing many
of the secrets developed through thirty man-years
of development and that give GA much of its advantage
in the marketplace.
Since it is owned by GA it is used only on GA chips.
The unusual tiled approach that it uses has been shown
to allow designs to be ported to different geometry
on a different process at a different fab and have
the new design work the first time with little more
than updates to the fab process spreadsheet section.
The last ten fab runs, even those in new sizes and
on new fabs all ran first time. This is a problem
that the rest of the industry still struggles with
and which is generally solved by detuning designs
by an order of magnitude to compensate for the
errors in Spice.
Chuck did say years ago that he did plan to put
OKAD into the public domain when he was done with
it. It is always difficult to make predictions
about what will happen in the future or when it
might happen.
Best Wishes
foxchip
The IDE lists a template block as the background for the IDE
display. The block includes blue words that determine the
formatting of the display and which execute the words that
dump the stack or local memory to the interface. The Forth
command line in colorforth passes Forth instructions from
the outside of a target chip through some path to a target
node where one can interactively probe or change the stack,
fetch and store to local memory, do I/O, and load and
execute programs out of RAM and run programs in ROM.
GA32 uses the same socket as S40 so I could open the zif
socket on the development board and replace an S40 with a
GA32. GA32 has one less column of nodes but is much cheaper
to prototype by being just a little smaller. There have
been small but important changes to hardware to make it
more robust, lower power, and easier to program.
GA4 has four nodes so each core has only two neighbors.
It has been put into two different packages. Along with
the async autobaud boot code in one node's ROM another
node has new PWM serial boot code that I reviewed.
The new hardware changes allow it to be smaller and faster
than previous single pin bit-bang serial packet boot code.
I showed how I could talk to a GA4 and a GA32 with the
IDE and run the PWM serial output code on GA32 to boot a
connected GA4 and execute programs there. So I used an
old IntellaSys development board for GA32 debugging and
a new small test board for GA4.
There are versions of the IDE for GA4, GA32, GA40, GA144,
and larger systems like the Haypress Creek board. There
should be other boards coming in the future like Haypress
Creek with GA144 or GA144 with multiple distributed GA4.
I talked a little about the details of the internals of
these Forth programs. Most intersting to me is that
Chuck does not use wordlists to deal with things like
the name conflicts that exist. There is a DUP in colorforth
that is 32 bits and can be compiled or executed. There is
a DUP in the target chip compiler that compiles a five bit
opcode for the 18-bit processor. There is also a DUP that
executes a DUP opcode interactively on the target processor.
Chuck is in charge of what gets compiled when and uses
compile order not wordlists to keep things simple. It
is one of the reasons why my first cross compiler was 20K
while Chuck's first cross compiler for the same target
was 0.3K.
Best Wishes
sxccaa.cal
"foxchip -
The IDE lists a template block as the background for the IDE
....
Best Wishes"
great .. thanks
and now -
17:00 --- Fireside Chat - Chuck Moore ??
foxchip
> 17:00 --- Fireside Chat - Chuck Moore ??
Chuck showed colorforth code for the Haypress Creek
board and using the IDE showed several small
applications using a small amount of the resources
on the board to generate video and display several
clocks in one of three fonts. The colorforth video
was displayed on the projector while Chuck had a
different monitor displaying the video generated
by the Haypress Creek board apps. Chuck commented
that he was the only person who had shown colorforth
running native and thus he was the only person who
didn't have to monkey with Windows windows to
do their presentation. For some people Windows
and the projector performed a sort of dance
adjusting the resolution of video going to the
projector repeatedly to the consternation of the
person trying to present a demo in that window.
He talked a little about the legal situation
with TPL and the upcoming arbitration. He
talked a little about what changes were going
on at Green Arrays and possible future directions.
Best Wishes
Ian Osgood
> 11:40 --- Discussion of a Native Forth for a NetBook - Sandy Bumgarner
> "Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a cute, inexpensive, and complete
> computer that runs only Forth? Ah, nothing but you, Forth, and the
> hardware! Such a system could be built with an ASUS Eee PC and perhaps
> other netbooks. Let's talk about it ..."
Of course, such a system already exists. Obtain an XO-1 from One
Laptop Per Child and a developers key. Then you have a cute,
inexpensive, low-power, child-proof, water-proof, dust-proof netbook
that boots to Open Firmware, a very capable Forth system.
Ian
Wayne
wrote:
> On Nov 22, 10:03 pm, peekay <pksharmakolk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> could you also elaborate on this talk please -
>>
>> 11:40 --- Discussion of a Native Forth for a NetBook - Sandy Bumgarner
>> another question .. why is OKADII not available
I can fully understand these sentiments, it is provably a good idea not to
release it, however if it is released I would be interested. I don't
imagine there is enough of a market to make it a commercial package on the
low end, until somebody can offer cheap fabrication. I wonder if the
methodology can be protected by patent and licensed for use in other
packages, even FPGA to produce output files for custom silicon versions?
Thanks
Wayne.
--
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/
Wayne
wrote:
I have not got around to examining the microcode forth stuff, but a system
that allowed colorforth in microcode could be interesting in respect to
effects on code compaction and speed.