[erlang-questions] BEAM in hardware

[Joe McGuckin]

 Chuck Moore’s ‘Moore Patent Portfolio’ has to be licensed by anyone manufacturing 
Microprocessors. Moore’s patents cover such essential  technologies like issuing more than one instruction per clock, multiple cores, embedded memory.

Pretty smart guy.



> On Sep 2, 2018, at 6:57 AM, Lloyd R. Prentice <lloyd@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> Some 30-odd years ago Chuck Moore, developer of Forth, turned his attention to chip design. He wrote his own chip-design CAD system in Forth and, subsequently designed and brought to silicon an impressive list of successful chips:
> 
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore
> 
> Chuck’s latest inspirations can be seen here:
> 
> http://www.greenarraychips.com/
> 
> The key to Chuck’s genius:  Pare the problem-at-hand down to it’s essence; seek starkest simplicity. This has kept him out of step with the computing mainstream throughout this career.
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> LRP
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
>> On Sep 2, 2018, at 6:17 AM, Mikael Pettersson <mikpelinux@REDACTED> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 10:33 PM, joe mcguckin <joe@REDACTED> wrote:
>>> Does anyone know if the BEAM vm has ever been implemented directly in hardware (e.g. in an FPGA)?
>> 
>> Not the BEAM that I know of, but Ericsson has had at least one project
>> to implement an "Erlang processor" (via different presumably simpler
>> VMs).
>> 
>> Apart from the usual problems of synthesizing a processor, you also
>> have to consider:
>> - there's a lot of implicit state and semantics in the BEAM
>> instructions, so you'd have to duplicate things like processes,
>> dynamic memory allocation, garbage collection, exception handling,
>> message passing, process links, etc
>> - the BIFs, without which you can't do much, at a minimum you'd need
>> networking support
>> 
>> Microcoded HW implementations of LISP and Smalltalk were popular in
>> the 70s and early 80s, but were quickly replaced by SW running on
>> RISCs with higher performance, lower cost, and quicker updates.
>> 
>> I'm not sure for what use case a HW Erlang makes sense (except as an
>> intellectual exercise).
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