[LMH] Ooh, look! List traffic!

[Dan Moniz]

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On Thursday, March 04, 2004 7:01 PM +0000 Robert Swindells=20
<rjs@fdy2.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> Nyef wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 10:18:20AM -0500, Nyef wrote:
> >>
> >> Yes, it's in Lisp. The old (late last year) source tarball is up in
> >> the same directory as all the screenshots (
> >> http://www.dridus.com/~nyef/lispm/nevermore/ ), and I'm doing some
> >> cleanup on the current sources in preparation for releasing them at
> >> some point in the next day or so.
>
> > Fitting action to words, the new version is up as
> > http://www.dridus.com/~nyef/lispm/nevermore/nevermore-9e0304.tgz
>
> > I am uncertain as to if I will be continuing with this codebase.
> > The speed has reached the point of untenability.
>
> I was only half joking about translating it to VHDL.
>
> Just having done the analysis of what the microarchitecture needs to
> do might be useful in the long run.
>
> The whole CPU would fit into a $15 FPGA using current technology, add
> a couple of 16bit SDRAMs and some boot flash and you have a 10x faster
> microExplorer.

Which is an interesting point. I wonder how hard it would be to write the=20
emulator (or CPU) in Verilog (being somewhat higher-level and easier to=20
cope with than VHDL, at least for this task). I assume "hard", and that=20
would be an understatement. But possibly worthwhile.

Of course, there's the longer term problem of getting a monitor and input=20
devices to talk to it, which would be painful, and disks, file systems, a=20
running install, oh my!

Probably, now that I think about it, an FPGA-based Explorer processor on a=20
PCI card, with some interface glue would be the way to go.

If someone is willing to buy me a simple Xilinx setup (usable FPGA for this =

purpose, test-board, Verilog compiler, etc.), I'll take a crack at it. I=20
won't hold my breath, but this equipment has come down in price. I think=20
the FPGA we'd want/need is more expensive than the one included in their=20
$70 - $100 starter kit.

Alastair, I should have asked you this years ago, but I've been somewhat=20
confused for a while as to where exploiter fit into the picture. E3 was=20
supposed to be an emulator, and exploiter was, what, your independently=20
developed emulator? And nevermore is the same sort of thing in CL (Mike=20
already asked this, but I had gathered as much from the code). For a while=20
now I've been confused as to what the relation was between E3 and=20
exploiter, but I never thought to ask. I always thought it was explained in =

one of the previous list emails, but in infrequent and rather shallow=20
searching of my personal archive of lispm-hackers over the years, I never=20
found a mail with an explanation. I'm just curious, BTW, because this bit=20
of information has been missing from my picture of the development effort.


--=20
Dan Moniz <dnm@pobox.com> [http://www.pobox.com/~dnm/]


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