X1000 xmos

[Britelite]

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

It could probably pull off a cool plasma, but then again, so can the vic20 (and every other machine ever made)

[commodorejohn]

John, I've been meaning to ask - what is your avatar? I've been trying to figure out what it means for over a year. What are the gestures he keeps on doing? Did you make it yourself?  :confused:

I always thought it was a woman in a dressing-gown having a meltdown.

:lol: It's an animation test from one of my perpetually-in-development game projects - one of the protagonists is a temporally-dislocated druidess. I just needed an avatar, and I'd recently put this together, so I figured why not

[Mazze]

Piru

All I hear about XMOS is what it is unsuitable for...

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

It can drive the ventilators of the board. Hot air powered by Amiga :roflmao:

[tabbybasco]

Actually, Xena, the Warrior Princess is a lesbian. The blonde chick who is her "companion" became her lover in latter episodes. Sorry to bust your wet dream bubbles boys.

But Trever and his merry men build the hardware, it's up to us how we use it. The beauty of programmable hardware is it can basically do whatever you want it to within it's capability. It really started out with PLA or Programmable Logic Arrays to simulate chip designs before they are sent to manufacturing. So...what we do with his hardware is none of Trever's business. Okk...get your minds out of the gutter.

[Daedalus]

Actually, Xena, the Warrior Princess is a lesbian. The blonde chick who is her "companion" became her lover in latter episodes. Sorry to bust your wet dream bubbles boys.

That ruins absolutely *nothing* for me I have to say... In fact, it probably has the opposite effect!

But Trever and his merry men build the hardware, it's up to us how we use it. The beauty of programmable hardware is it can basically do whatever you want it to within it's capability. It really started out with PLA or Programmable Logic Arrays to simulate chip designs before they are sent to manufacturing. So...what we do with his hardware is none of Trever's business. Okk...get your minds out of the gutter.

As Piru said, the design of the Xena isn't suited to traditional computing ideas like chipset emulation. It might be possible, but you'd be much better off with an FPGA on a PCI card. What it's really about is real-time I/O. I'm sure someone will come up with some interesting uses, but using it as a traditional co-processor isn't really gonna happen.

[hishamk]

Real-time I/O? Amigas back in the game at JPL monitoring Delta rockets?

[takemehomegrandma]

Piru

All I hear about XMOS is what it is unsuitable for...

What CAN it do?

Ask the X1000 board developers/manufacturers! Why did they put it there, what will they use it for? It must have some kind of point, there must be some kind of reason, right...?

[takemehomegrandma]

It can drive the ventilators of the board. Hot air powered by Amiga :roflmao:

Vapor! Brilliant! :lol:

[Tripitaka]

http://www.xmos.com/applications

...sadly not as exciting as a big ass FPGA IMHO, but then a clockport was once just a clockport, now it's a very useful expansion option.

[Karlos]

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

[dammy]

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

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

[Ancalimon]

Can XENA be used to design some kind of "A1200 connector" with can be plugged inside the expansion slot for full custom chipset access

[takemehomegrandma]

a clockport was once just a clockport, now it's a very useful expansion option.

A hack to workaround the absence of PCI. The X1000 however does have PCI...

[jorkany]

It should be safe to assume that the X1000 XMOS will be used for the same kinds of things that it's been demoed doing at X1000 presentations.

[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.

[koaftder]

I used an xs1l1 in a commercial product. The advantage of using it over various other microcontrollers was that you could delegate parts of the software off to different threads instead of having to manage a nested interrupt scheme dealing with I/O. This made auditing the code and verifying the design extremely easy.

As for what it's use could be in a desktop computer... I'd call it useless and a waste of time. You have gigs of ram, a 2GHz 64 bit dual core processor to play with. A little microcontroller with 2 cores with 64KiB of ram each and no FPU doesn't look very interesting compared to that, not to mention the development environment which makes using said microcontroller a productive experience requires Java, which if I'm not mistaken doesn't run on on AOS4.

That's not to say there isn't lots of fun to be had with the Xmos microcontrollers. You won't have any fun with it as long as its bolted onto a motherboard and wired up to a card slot that's next to impossible for a hobbyist to interface to. For anyone wanting to get their feet wet I'd recommend visiting Xmos's website and picking up one of their inexpensive eval boards.