Timothy Normand Miller wrote:

> For a variety of reasons, AI isn't working out for me.  The obvious
> alternative is computer architecture, so I'm switching to that.  I
> thought that some open hardware folks might be interested in working
> on some projects in this area, where I can bring some formal research
> to the table.  One of my areas of interest is, no surprise,
> special-purpose processors.  How about we have a discussion on that?
> The reason I bring this up is that a lot of things could be
> publishable serious research topics, so I'd be able to select some to
> focus my primary attention on.

The reason I can't wait to get my hands on an OGD1 is to play with
architectures with a functional (as opposed to imperative) machine
language. Even though our FPGA is not partially reprogrammable, it's big
enough to simulate a smaller FPGA with any custom architecture.

It could work something like this: the syntax tree of a function is loaded
into the FPGA and executes at 1 invocation per cycle, with the depth of
the tree as latency. Block RAMs would be used for memoization of results
and as buffers between callers and callees. The interesting part would be
to find a heuristic for placing and routing the tree which requires amounts
of logic comparable to the out-of-order execution and branch prediction
logic of modern CPUs.

Once that works, the last part would be to search for problems which this
solution solves :)


- Viktor Pracht
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