[9fans] GreenArrays and Plan 9/ Inferno

[Shane Morris <edgecomberts@gmail.com>]

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Hello 9fans,

I saw reference to the GreenArrays chips on the list a while back, had a
look, and was mighty impressed. Then I wondered, "Exactly what does Plan 9
or Inferno have to do with these chips, and how do they relate?"

I considered you could have the 144CPU chip with mini-Styx processing
routines, which would serve my needs well - I need to move in a whole heap
of file data, process it in various ways, and move it out again, quickly,
and the promise of 90 billion instructions per second really excited me.

Obviously, these processors aren't floating point processors, and thats
fine, I'm working with moving floating point sensor readings into and out
of the "grid on a chip" and doing some basic functions on them, in a file
based format. Its just the true potential that has me going "Wow, I can see
this cloudy outline, but it still looks cool..."

I admit, I may be barking right up the wrong tree here, and if I am, I will
stand corrected. I'm just wondering of the potential of these chips,
coupled with a fast FPGA and an PCI-e x1 link to an APU running Plan 9 as a
"head node." I have a programmer who has always wanted to play with FPGAs
as a technology, and I have several books on basic VHDL. But yeah, lets not
put the cart in front of the horse now, right?

Thanks everyone!

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