Paul Berlin & PTSC: Do you guys want a sale?
Re: Shboom Chip
From W H Powell <bill@mrv5.demon.co.uk>
Organization The Powell household
Date Mon, 18 May 1998 12:34:28 +0100
Newsgroups comp.lang.forth
Message-ID <psjYmHAEzBY1EwaR@mrv5.demon.co.uk>
References 1 2 3 4 5 6
I've just been reading some news from Patriot <www.ptsc.com/nes/pres
srel/pr091697> etc. And some mysterious 'URLman' picked this up and
pointed me to an unoffical PTSC page <www.geocities.com/WallStreet/Floor
/7157/>.
The latter is aimed at investors in high tech looking for exciting
prospects. The higher the risk the bigger the pay-off if the investment
succeeds! Don't forget that ARM was once an outsider too.
What I learn is Patriot was a _very_ small co. until a few months
ago with around 17 employees. It was almost a family business. So if
you work in company that won't touch a PC that doesn't have a blue IBM
sticker on it then Patriot is not for you.
ShBoom was first offered 1996 and during 1997 Patriot have signed up
some good contracts which give it credibility.
On the technical front ShBoom has a lot going for it. It started as
0.8u technology. Now 0.35u has been announced taking it to 150 MHz
clock speed. It is not clear whether This is the external or internal
clock speed - internal is 2x external.
The ShBoom is not just for Java, but for Forth and C and other
langues too. SUN's own JAVA chip is much more language specific.
ShBoom was already being shipped from Patriot while the SUN chip was
still just sales talk.
I'm especially impressed by this piece...
------------------ Clipping -------------
Carl Pick, Chairman and CEO of the Wisconsin-based firm, said, "
GENROCO has chosen the Patriot Scientific PSC1000 32-bit 100MHz RISC
microprocessor as the heart of our next generation controllers because
of the chip's low cost, small size, and high performance. The PSC1000 is
the key component which will allow new GENROCO modules to execute
firmware over 20 times faster than current offerings, allowing us to
readily scale the technology from present gigabit to future gigabyte per
second bandwidths."
GENROCO considered many microprocessor chips such as Digital
Semiconductor's StrongArm and Intel's i960, before deciding on Patriot
Scientific's stack architecture in conjunction with the FORTH
development system. "
The PSC1000 runs high-bandwidth, real-time applications faster and more
efficiently than direct instruction chips," said Pick. "
We even compared real-time code on a 500 MHz, several hundred dollar
Alpha chip against the PSC1000 and in most of the important cases for
us, the PSC1000 was faster. Patriot's technology was exactly what we
needed to ensure the performance and flexibility of our next-generation
controllers."
--------------- End Clipping --------------
GENROCO is in areas such as video and FibreChannel that are of great
interest to my company also.
It is clear that Patriot took on the ShBoom for one of their own
projects programming it in Forth. The above makes clear that GENROCO
are also using it with Forth.
But Patriot have realised that JAVA fits nearly as well as Forth and
have been able to offer a chip better suited to JAVA than SUN actually
had available. Hence the JAVA excitement about the chip.
So Forth _should_ already be available for ShBoom without having to
re-invent it. But I suggest that Stephen sort out a Forth offering from
MPE in case it does take does beat SUN and ARM etc.
I don't know whether I can convice my employer to run with ShBoom.
But I'd like Stephen to give me some good pointers to the ARMs
strengths and any comparisons.
Bill. |
