Thanks Fats,
I am a little surprised that more people have not researched XCore and the XMOS chips in detail, since they are included in the newest flagship of the AmigaOne line.
I know not everyone can afford one, but I thought maybe some of the X1000 beta testers could comment on what the XMOS chips is and what it can and cannot do, without infringing on their NDA's with A-Eon.
Just a general statement or two about how they differ from FPGA's, since both appear to be programmable chips. One using VHDL, or Verilog and the other using the "C" language with X extensions to program them.
I guess the people that know are too busy to be reading this thread. I will have to do more research on my own, but was hoping one of the experts would chime in.
Where are you Steve Solie? You might not be an expert on XMOS, but I'll bet you can shed some light on my questions.
I thought we already kind of covered the possibilities in a thread about a year ago and it seemed people that might have some inkling chimed in at the time, and nobody could really come up with any sensible use for it. Sorry to sound negative, but I think that's why you aren't hearing any real use for it being proposed.
I'm just a software guy and I haven't looked at the XMOS in gory detail, but to me this just looks like a CPU that is good for wiring to other hardware and is particularly good at responding to multiple events with low latency, better than a general purpose CPU for that. But it's also nowhere as fast as a general purpose CPU.
If it served as the main CPU for some bit of electronic hardware it can probably do the intended job for a decent price. But sticking it inside a computer where there's already a powerful CPU and IO slots? Doesn't make much sense to me at all. Sure, you could make it do something and make it interface to some hardware in the Xorro slot or whatever, but is this something that will work out better than what can be done with IO boards on a PC? I don't really know as I'm not a hardware guy, but it seems to me if XMOS was a great idea you could just plug a card into your PC or have one come on it's motherboard. Maybe you can, but I don't hear much about that there either as solving many of the world's problems.
