GreenArrays and SchmartBoard Make the GA144 Chip Accessible to Experimenters and Hobbyists

http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=3336

The chip in question is quite a screamer. 90 billion instructions a second for 1 watt. 144 cores. If they are all idle 14 microwatts.

http://www.ecnmag.com/Blogs/2011/09/M-Simon/GreenArrays-and-SchmartBoard-Make-the-GA144-Chip-Accessible-to-Experimenters/

GreenArrays and SchmartBoard Make the GA144 Chip Accessible to Experimenters
By M. Simon | Thursday, September 29, 2011

GreenArrays, the makers of the GA144 chip, announces an OEM partnership with Schmart Board that will allow hobbyists and experimenters to get in on the fun provided by playing around with a chip with 144 cores that can do around 90 billion instructions per second at a total power of under one watt (typical) while running at full clip and which only uses about 14 microwatts when everything is idle.

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The page gives you access to development software and a chip simulator which is fully functional and downloadable free of charge.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore

n 1968, while employed at the United States National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Moore invented the initial version of the Forth language to help control radio telescopes. In 1971 he co-founded (with Elizabeth Rather) FORTH, Inc., the first, and still one of the leading, purveyors of Forth solutions. During the 1970s he ported Forth to dozens of computer architectures.

In the 1980s, Moore turned his attention and Forth development techniques to CPU design, developing several stack machine microprocessors and gaining several microprocessor-related patents <4> along the way. His designs have all emphasized high performance at low power usage. He also explored alternate Forth architectures such as cmForth and machine Forth, which more closely matched his chips' machine languages. These later evolved in 1996 into colorForth for the IBM PC.

In 1983 Moore founded Novix, Inc., where he developed the NC4000 processor. This design was licensed to Harris Semiconductor which marketed it as the RTX2000, a radiation hardened stack processor which has been used in numerous NASA missions. In 1985 at his consulting firm Computer Cowboys, he developed the Sh-Boom processor. Starting in 1990, he developed his own VLSI CAD system, OKAD, to overcome limitations in existing CAD software. He used these tools to develop several multi-core minimal instruction set computer (MISC) chips: the MuP21 in 1990 and the F21 in 1993.

Moore was a founder of iTv Corp,<5><6> one of the first companies to work on internet appliances. In 1996 he designed another custom chip for this system, the i21.<7><8>

One of Moore's recent projects is the colorForth dialect of Forth, a language derived from the scripting language for his custom VLSI CAD system, OKAD. In 2001, he rewrote OKAD in colorForth and designed the c18 processor.

In 2005, Moore co-founded and became Chief Technology Officer of IntellaSys, which develops and markets his chip designs, such as the seaForth-24 multi-core processor.

In 2009, he co-founded and became CTO of GreenArrays, Inc which is marketing the GA4 and GA144 multi-computer chips.