Hi Tom
At first, the name Patriot Scientific didn't ring any bells. The name Schboom did, however. That's a 20-bit (not a typo) Forth chip by Charles Moore, the chap that invented Forth as a computer language way back when core was 4k and you didn't have much room to play.
Eventually, there was the Novix chip he designed and that one really ran fast. But, that on a 5 mhz clock. Forth is a semantically rich stack-oriented (read: post-fix) language. Chuck got the Novix chip to run up to 3 or 4 Forth opcodes in one clock cycle for some sequences of opcodes. So, when you consider that on a, say X86 chip it might take several clock cycles to do something simple like fetch a number, fetch another number, and add them together, the Novix chip would do all that in one clock cycle (because the numbers are on an internal stack, not out in memory.) Charles Moore is one incredibly intelligent fellow.
Now, about the company: I know from nothing about them. Novix is no longer in business. A 20-bit chip makes no sense to me, unless you are just thinking about an imbedded chip and there it would be just fine -- a sortof overgrown 16-bit chip, about what the original x86 family was. It should be awfully fast and useful in that market, plus which there are lots of Forth hackers out there (including me).
In fact, I could wish that Java had originally been an extension to Forth: the Forth interpreter might be much easier to make run faster than the byte-code interpreter of Java.
It will be interesting to see how this one plays out. Last I heard, Chuck was still playing with the design.
Jack |
