Re: MISC personal computers

[Lonnie.Reed@xxxxxxxxxxx (Lonnie Reed)]

Is there any word on when these iTV devices might be available? Will
they be expensive in small quantities (at first?)

-lonnie


>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>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
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>