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| Easy money...£200k/yr job in electronics? |
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| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: MK14 on March 23, 2020, 12:41:37 am --- --- Quote from: tggzzz on March 23, 2020, 12:34:55 am ---Yup. Effectively there are no interrupts in xCORE processors: you simply dedicate a core to an i/o port and (if necessary) it sleeps until the input has arrived. The language has primitives indicating the clock cycle on which output will occur, or capturing the clock cycle on which input did occur. To a useful approximation inter-core comms is the same as i/o: messages to/from other cores are identical to "messages" to/from i/o ports. I'm far from being an expert in xCORE or xC, but it just worked as I wanted it to work, as stated in the documentation and as I would expect it to work. Stunningly pain-free, unlike other MCUs with their strange i/o config registers etc :) --- End quote --- For some application areas, that sounds really good. It reminds me of the Propeller processors (by Parallax), at least in the concept of having many cores, for easy/good embedded use. --- End quote --- Exactly. Multicore hardware is trivial; multiprocessor languages and software always have been (and continue to be) the big problem. Hence I found Propellor to be uninteresting, and didn't bother to build anything with it. A key point about xCORE/xC is the tight integration of hardware and software, just like Transputer and Occam. David May has been involved in all of that. In addition Transputer/Occam and xCORE/xC have solid theoretical roots in CSP. |
| MK14:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on March 23, 2020, 12:48:52 am ---Exactly. Multicore hardware is trivial; multiprocessor languages and software always have been (and continue to be) the big problem. Hence I found Propellor to be uninteresting, and didn't bother to build anything with it. A key point about xCORE/xC is the tight integration of hardware and software, just like Transputer and Occam. David May has been involved in all of that. In addition Transputer/Occam and xCORE/xC have solid theoretical roots in CSP. --- End quote --- The thing is. Just like with mcu's bigger brothers, desktop processors. The laws of Physics, such as the speed of light (which the speed of electricity presumably (Physics can get complicated) relates to, as well as other parameters), and other practical limits, such as capacitance of real life components. Effectively making exceeding 5 GHz (exact limit debatable, maybe 6 or 7 GHz, would be a better figure here, so please take this value as approximate), without spending huge amounts of money, needing crazy amounts of power, and almost impractical cooling solutions. Ever harder. I wouldn't want to give it a hard limit. yes you can do 5.1 GHz, and 5.2 GHz etc. But, we are reaching the practical limits, of existing production technologies (we are at around 7nm as regards production/ and existing sales, but 5nm is coming and probably smaller still). So, going parallel. Seems to be the logical (excuse the pun) way forward. That is what AMD are doing with their newer ranges of Ryzen processors. With an amazing 64 core desktop/workstation cpu (hugely expensive though (around £4K, for the top one), but worth it, if you need the horse power, such as high end content creators). Even 128 cores, by going for a pair of server cpus. Also, graphics processors, have also gone this route. Depending on how you count them, with potentially, tens of thousands of processors (and/or threads). So, microcontrollers in embedded systems, are going to need to go the same way, sooner or later. Because of the potential power savings, of running a large number of cores at lower frequencies. That can also be another reason, as some embedded systems can't produce much heat (fan not allowed, impracticable and/or too unreliable), and may need to use little power, because of needing to run off batteries. |
| ocset:
--- Quote ---You should probably inform the British Intelligence service whoever they are as this sounds like industrial espionage! I am appalled that you are even thinking of this and discussing it in a forum where EE enthusiasts gather to solve each others' problems and teach/help in the process. Unless you are a Chinese national floating the idea to gather what kind of response you could get, you should be scared. Just my opinion. --- End quote --- ..scared...who of?...nobody does anything about this kind of thing....we will just fill our boots...then we will be over to the states to do the same thing there. Having said that, people in the states are already doing exactly this. And people, even people like you, dont do anything about it. Gauranteed that you wont write to your politician about it. Gauranteed you wont join the "revive USA industry" group...because there isnt one...neither is there a "Revive British industry" group...well there is, but nobody wants to join it... https://massey276.wixsite.com/revive ..this is why we will clean up! |
| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: MK14 on March 23, 2020, 01:01:56 am --- --- Quote from: tggzzz on March 23, 2020, 12:48:52 am ---Exactly. Multicore hardware is trivial; multiprocessor languages and software always have been (and continue to be) the big problem. Hence I found Propellor to be uninteresting, and didn't bother to build anything with it. A key point about xCORE/xC is the tight integration of hardware and software, just like Transputer and Occam. David May has been involved in all of that. In addition Transputer/Occam and xCORE/xC have solid theoretical roots in CSP. --- End quote --- The thing is. Just like with mcu's bigger brothers, desktop processors. The laws of Physics, such as the speed of light (which the speed of electricity presumably (Physics can get complicated) relates to, as well as other parameters), and other practical limits, such as capacitance of real life components. Effectively making exceeding 5 GHz (exact limit debatable, maybe 6 or 7 GHz, would be a better figure here, so please take this value as approximate), without spending huge amounts of money, needing crazy amounts of power, and almost impractical cooling solutions. Ever harder. I wouldn't want to give it a hard limit. yes you can do 5.1 GHz, and 5.2 GHz etc. But, we are reaching the practical limits, of existing production technologies (we are at around 7nm as regards production/ and existing sales, but 5nm is coming and probably smaller still). So, going parallel. Seems to be the logical (excuse the pun) way forward. That is what AMD are doing with their newer ranges of Ryzen processors. With an amazing 64 core desktop/workstation cpu (hugely expensive though (around £4K, for the top one), but worth it, if you need the horse power, such as high end content creators). Even 128 cores, by going for a pair of server cpus. Also, graphics processors, have also gone this route. Depending on how you count them, with potentially, tens of thousands of processors (and/or threads). So, microcontrollers in embedded systems, are going to need to go the same way, sooner or later. Because of the potential power savings, of running a large number of cores at lower frequencies. That can also be another reason, as some embedded systems can't produce much heat (fan not allowed, impracticable and/or too unreliable), and may need to use little power, because of needing to run off batteries. --- End quote --- The fundamental limits are the speed of light (i.e. latency) and heat generation. We are pushing both: compare the heat flux with that in a kettle or nuclear reactor, and the time it takes a signal to get across a chip (worse: to another chiplet) with the clock period. The AMD/intel chips (and SMP big iron) all rely on cache coherency. The messages associated with cache coherency protocols become a limiting factor: too many messages, too long latency. There are a few techniques for not requiring cache coherency, e.g. CSP and descendents, or MapReduce etc. We need more techniques. |
| Koen:
--- Quote from: MK14 on March 23, 2020, 12:36:06 am ---Someone seems to have stolen your thread. https://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/threads/great-idea-for-chinese-importation-business.404674/ --- End quote --- Typical. They stole his street lights, they stole his power supplies, they stole his thread. Hang on there treez! |
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