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Comment by daniel-cussen | Hacker News Reader

With low RAM like that, what you want to do is math, not UI. That means electrical engineering or number crunching, AFAIK.

OK, so first, it has a lot of I/O ports of different kinds on just one chip. In a lab, you could run lots of analogue knobs and many servos attached to just one chip. This means a lot less hardware debugging, which should be a Godsend.

Another possibility is HPC. You can tile a motherboard with these, cool them all down to -50 very easily and cheaply, and then overclock them as you perform number crunching that you couldn't do with a GPU. After all, these cores are truly independent, and can therefore branch independently, unlike GPU cores. That opens the door to a wide variety of algorithms that aren't GPGPU accessible.

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I've always thought it was a nifty chip, but one I couldn't think of an application for. Things like the 18-bit word size can throw some developers off -- the last time I looked at the chip some audio application guys were kvetching that they really need 24 bits for their applications. I'm skeptical that the architecture is a good fit for number crunching, but perhaps I'm just blind to all the numeric apps that 18-bit integers are nifty for.

yet like said at the beginning, it doesn't stop me from wishing I had an excuse to play with them. Blazing speed with lots of cores, there ought to be some applications that for that sort of parallel horsepower.

A very peculiar kind of number crunching that would be. With 64 words, that should be some finely selected numbers :)

I'd love to be able to do some useful work with that, of course.

Don't think of the F18 computers in isolation- think about doing stream processing with a network of them. You probably can't fit your application on one F18, but you could easily fit one or two functions in 64 words, especially given that a single machine word can contain up to four instructions.

It sure looks like a fine chip for a very small niche, but they don't even have floating point instructions AFAIK, so you'd have to emulate them in software. So I'm extremely skeptical about their number crunching capabilities.

No floating point. I believe design complexity of the chip would increase manifold if it was. Emulation is not an option too with those extremely limited resources (64 words of memory). The design philosophy of this chip is that 18 bits of integer precision should be enough for your applications, period. I just feel like I'm not smart enough to figure out how to fit a useful application into that.

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