X1000 xmos

[Karlos]

It's a low latency, hardware-threaded IO processor, not an FPGA.

[Karlos]

It's got what, 64K of RAM per core?

I don't know, to be honest. Koaftder would be the guy to ask, he's done some work with XMOS chips I believe.

The hardware designers must have had some intended use in mind.

[Karlos]

Perhaps it could be used to implement some IO glue for people wanting to do crazy things, like attach legacy Amiga hardware.

[Karlos]

@Kesa

Sometimes the Emperor really doesn't have any clothes.....

XMOS is a wonderful microcontroller, but attaching it to a 1700 quid computer doesn't add anything to either XMOS or the computer.  A food processor is a wonderful invention, so is a TV, but attaching the food processor to the TV doesn't give extra value to either the TV or Food Processor.

Well, with all the cooking programs on TV these days....

Besides, you probably said the same thing about alarm clocks and radios.

:lol:

[Karlos]

Calling XMOS parallelism massive is quite a stretch.

GPUs have that, however. My ATI Radeon HD 6970 has 1536 cores and total 2.7 TFLOPS (sp), and it's rather easy to utilize it with OpenCL.

Boooo! nVidia+CUDA 4.x FTW :lol:

I'd always be careful quoting teraflop values for graphics cards. They're almost always unattainable in real code, even code that is explicitly parallel by nature. Unless your code is a perfectly structured sequence of fused multiply-add without any memory accesses, branches or scheduling overhead, at any rate.

[Karlos]

What CAN it do? Please tell me that it can create a cool plasma effect or something...

If I had to guess, I'd suggest that perhaps the intended purpose of the XMOS chip is to allow the signal specification for the "xorro" slot to be customised from software. A customisable geek port that you can rewire using code, maybe?

[Karlos]

I agree.

But who will do it? I mean designing and manufacturing the custom PCB-things...? And for what purose that couldn't be done by existing USB/PCI devides?

Maybe there are a some interested engineers at Varisys that wanted to have something fun to play with?

[Karlos]

Is it really? What's hacker friendly about a PCIe connector?

PCIe ribbon cables, for one. Since it's a point to point "many serial lanes" protocol, rather than some tricky to time parallel one, breaking out of a PCIe slot for some hacking probably involves getting a PCIe ribbon cable, chopping one end off and soldering the signal lines to your nefarious homebrew hardware...