News

[jfox@xxxxxxxx (Jeff Fox)]

Dear MISC readers,

The list has been pretty quiet but a lot of things have been
going on.  I don't think I have posted anything here since September.
I had shipped a few copies of the videos of Chuck and some copies
of the new simulator and emulator and demos from the Ultra Technology
online store.  I thought some people might make some comments on the
simulator or emulator or the demos that Stas and I did for them.

In late September I released the F21 simulator for free use with an
upgrade that allowed it to run the same demos as the emulator.  Some
people asked for a demo that did something they were familiar with
and Stas provided a nice little BMP file decode.  It is fun to compare
it on the F21 emulator to other programs that do it in Windows, but
Michael says that it is unfair to make such comparisons.  I wish I
had a way to precisely measure how long Windows programs like PAINT
or Wingif take to display the sample image that Stas sent with program.
I made the simulator and demos available for free but no one made
any comments on it here or in c.l.f.

I expect F21d back for packaging this week and am excited about testing
it.  To celebrate I released the F21 emulator 1.2 for free use with an
upgrade that allows it load and execute boot ROMs.  For those who
purchased the emulator will qualify for a discount on orders of other
hardware and software.  I put some counters on different pages to see
how many people come through the front door (www.ultratechnology.com)
or through the store to the F21 product page and the emulator documentation or
on to the emulator updates page at www.ultratechnology.com/f21emu/updates.htm

The first generation of simulators only ran at a few thousand simulated
F21 instructions per second.  The emulator has gone from 600K max F21
mips in the first release on my 120mhz Pentium machine to 5.7 F21 mips
with release 1.2.  I am usually very pleased to see working programs
sped up by three orders of magnitude.  But I scare people when I make
comments about it.

With no video being generated and running sequential
stack instructions in fast SRAM F21 can get a max of 222mips.  When
running in DRAM the max without video is 111.  With video being generated
and the CPU in DRAM the mips rate can drop to 20mips or lower.  This
means that the emulator running on a very fast PC will now execute at
close to the speed of a real F21 in DRAM and giving most of its bandwidth
to coprocessors.  This makes it more useful for debugging complex and
detailed programs.  It also makes it more suitable as a virtual machine
implementation for the five bit virtual machine Forth that we execute
in hardware on the MISC machines.  I have experimented a little with
using it as a helper in Netscape this way.

Chuck's latest changes to OKAD modeling and simulation are quite
interesting.  I often ask him, "Does this product offer that feature?"
"Well it is an add on for an extra $100,000."  But people get upset
when you tell them how fast the prices go up if you have to pay for
conventional tools that do what Chuck's software does.

His latest changes to Color Forth are interesting too. I am sure he
will have a thought provoking paper ready later this month.  The latest
change that I saw was putting the cursor at the right edge of the bottom
line and scrolling input from the right.  Since he is executing each
word after each space this provides a extra row of characters for his
visual history.  Since his displays use such large characters it is
an interesting use of limited screen display space.

I removed some of the old junk from the store and made a button for
anyone who wants die before they get packaged in clcc or want to
reserve some of the prototype chips before they are all spoken for.

I had planned to take John Rible's VLSI Design class this semester
and act as one of his lab assistants.  I had offered to post weekly
reports to this group of the material, assignments and progress.
Unfortunately the class did not happen this semester because of
lack of interest.  Oh well, John really wanted a semester off even
if I was looking forward to it.  He will offer it again next year
and I do want to get in and play with his design and FPGA tools.

I was hoping that there would be more interest in the Design Your
Own Processor project.  My guess is that people were waiting to
see online documentation with step by step tutorials loading
more and more complex circuits into the FPGA and debugging them.
I thought that maybe John's class would get me a leg up to help
start providing those sorts of thing to get other people interested.
I talked to Chuck the other day about the project and the intellectual
property issues.  He was very positive about encouraging people to
do research and learn what they could. I see that the DYOP project
is starting to get the tutorials and documentation so maybe it will
take off.  I will have to remain focused on F21 now for a while.

I also understand that the Ultra Technology and DYOP web site URLs
are going to be listed in an upcoming article by Don Lancaster in
the Jan 99 issue of Electronics Now.  Unfortunately Don was given
www.dnai.com/~jfox   instead of www.UltraTechnology.com
I really wish people would use the registered domain name because
the site could always move from the original address and it is
easier for people to remember UltraTechnology.com than dnai.com/~jfox
which ultimately may have nothing to do with Ultra Technology, who knows.

Oh well.  So much for the news report.  Wish me luck with getting
the chips back and packaged and paid for and tested and working and 
to do the right demos to impress the right people.  Is that too much
to ask for?

Jeff Fox
Ultra Technology