On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 3:13 PM, Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Bob La Quey wrote: > > The Intellasys SeaForth 24 chip was designed with the tools > > that you are disparaging. How would you have designed such > > a chip? > > Before you assign too much value to his tools, I would like to point out > that chips of the complexity level of the SeaForth 24 were designed with > far fewer tools. > > The Intel 8080, Motorola 6800, RCA 1802, etc. were all done without any > computer tools other than maybe calculators. Their design complexity > looks quite a bit higher than the SeaForth from looking at the marketing > literature. Although, the RCA 1802 might actually be comparable as it > was quite a bit simpler than others of its time.
The point I would make was that those chips and many of the chips that have followed gained very little from their added complexity. They did get huge traction from the network effect associated with a large user base and serious marketing behind them. The risc/cisc debate played out this very question, just fixated on register as opposed to stack architectures. > This does not disparage Chuck. VLSI design is hard no matter who does it. Agreed. > > The trick is understanding. Undestanding how to go from > > the chip level to much higher levels of architecture in > > a powerful hierarchy, which Forth makes relatively easy to > > do if you understand what it is that is to be done. If you > > don't have that understanding then Forth won't help you. > > Agreed. And if you have that understanding, Forth probably doesn't > multiply your force much. Maybe. > An interesting experiment would be to see if Chuck's stuff could be > duplicated in something like Lisp and how many lines of code that would > take. I suspect it would take about the same amount of code. Except for syntax and the important issue of memory management the languages have much in common. Chuck's point, over and over again, is that our committee approach to design (both of hardware and software) inevitably leads to huge amounts of unnecessary complexity. Since most of us are not as bright as Chuck and rarely can find employment free from the burden of "the committee" we necessarily think Chuck must be wrong. I think he is right, but being a reasonable man I choose most often to conform. BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
