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claudio_mos | 1 year ago

Yes, of course to load a character I use LD.T

Uhmm..actually the OUT instruction ends immediately after its normal cycle. the character is sent to the mainboard that reads it and puts it in a buffer and passes from a buffer. (it's more complex, if you want we can discuss)

The external BUS is 24 trit. the motherboard converts it by encoding it into binary and the data is stored on 48bit RAM. We don't have native ternary RAM yet unfortunately, but it was the only way to have some memory and use the processor.

I don't quite understand what idea I describe in the OP you're referring to. And I don't understand what ternary operations might be useful for neural networks (we've had contact with Korean researchers asking about this processor for neural networks).

The specifications obviously exist, but I don't think it's a good idea to put them here on a generic site! I think the marketing phase will take a while longer and as you may have read on the site, we're still fixing things here and there and we need a marketing apparatus.

discuss

order

rep_lodsb|1 year ago

The comment/question about OUT was more speculation on how it worked on the prototype. But maybe this buffer is part of the architecture, in which case you'd have to consider what happens if it get completely filled (could happen easily with just a few MHz CPU, at standard serial port speeds).

Re. memory: of course with no ternary RAM, you have to somehow encode the trits into bits. But I was more curious about the address bus. So if your memory is organized like this:

    --- word #0
    --0
    --+
    -0-
    -00 word #1
    -0+
    -+-
    -+0
    -++ word #2
how does that map to binary addresses for the RAM chip(s)? What if you had ternary RAM, would that change how you address it? Does address --0 map to the second lowest/highest (depending on endianness) tryte in word #0, or something entirely different?

Maybe you thought about this a lot more than I have and figured out an ingenious solution. But I would have either gone with word addresses, or power-of-3 units.

And how all of this ties into non-Von Neumann architectures, I still have no clue.

claudio_mos|1 year ago

Yes, the serial buffer is included in the motherboard. The problem is not so much for OUT but for IN, if the buffer fills up.

As for the bus addresses, the counter program starts from the lowest address. The mainboard obviously knows how much RAM is present and performs a translation to the first available low address. Nothing transcendental.

I did not understand the connection with VonNeumann architectures, this is a classic vonneumann architecture, only that the information is in base 3...

Anyway you seem to be really very expert, certainly more than me (I am mainly a programmer and I had to learn these things at low level practically by myself), you could actively help the project...