Re: MISC personal computers

[jfox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jeff Fox)]

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Dear MISC readers,

Lonnie Reed wrote:

>I would be very interested in this too. I think if an open source forth system
>with networking capability and basic network services (mail, http, etc)
>that would fit on a floppy say... It would provide a foundation to building
>a GUI, and other applications. Oh yeah, and multitasking of course. ;)

At the Forth day Michael Montvelishsky did a presentatioin about the
profile of the iTV embedded software.  From what I have seen it is about
an order of magnitude smaller than the next smallest product with 
similar features and it can run with substantially less total memory.
A 512k flash file system holds 100k bytes of compressed object code
and application files.  The system includes a whole list of network
protocols, flash files, dynamic memory management with garbage collection,
fast multitasking, GUI, browser, email, forth compiler, support for
forth web pages.  When looking at the size of each module it is obvious
which modules were written in machine Forth and which modules were
written in high level ANS Forth.  The present system size of about 100k
words could be signifigantly reduced if it were all in machine Forth.
Most of the modules written in machine Forth take a couple of K words.

>As someone else mentioned, using multiple cpu's would be a great idea. At a
>minimum there should be 2. One (or more) for i/o, and one (or more) for 
>the os/applications. It seems stupid to bog down your main processor to 
>handle i/o, making you aplication performance suffer unecessarily.

Of course this is the idea behind the serial/network coprocessor on F21.
Each node provides a mix of CPU power and I/O power.  This way if you
want to use the analog coprocessors on three nodes to generate 8bit
analog on the RGB pins of a monitor to get 800x600 in 24bit color or
HDTV format it is just a matter of using some nodes for specialized I/O.  
Those nodes would have very little memory bandwith available for CPU use
beyond the bandwidth needed for video and network.  Network is of
course very efficient on the memory bus, either nothing or simple DMA.

The volume cost for an F21 node is now really low because of the price
of memory.  A couple of hundred mips or 40mhz analog I/O per one square
inch $10 node makes a MISC SMP look pretty attractive.

>I would also be interested in creating something similar for a "generic"
>x86 pc, something like a basic linux(unix) work-alike that had basic 
>commands to manipulate a file system, and other useful things like
>tar, compress/zip, telnet, cat, ping, etc.  

I support any effort to port Linux or a subset to the MISC environment.
There is no reason that a tight port could not take advantage of the
power available.  But there are a lot of problems to be solved and it
is not at the top of my list.

The iTV app can act as a server, ping, telnet, and some other things.
Some things can be done in a couple of K and some others are a little
more complex.  Most of those application programs only need a couple
of K.

Jeff Fox   Ultra Technology
www.UltraTechnology.com

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