[erlang-questions] BEAM in hardware

[Dmytro Lytovchenko]

On Sat, 1 Sep 2018 at 23:44, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@REDACTED>
wrote:

>
>
> On 9/1/18 5:06 PM, Dmytro Lytovchenko wrote:
> > There is no known hardware implementation because the original BEAM
> > 158-instruction set is quite complex to load, parse and interpret, and
> > the runtime part of hardware to support built-ins and data types would
> > be pretty massive. But it might be possible if you simplify the opcode
> > set, simplify the memory structure (to save on bit manipulations)
> > similar to Python or Java memory model, and shrink it to something
> > that is possible to hard-wire.
>
> Is it really any more complex than, implementing a CISC processor, or
> something funky like a GPU or the old BBN Butterfly?  For that matter,
> the old DG Nova had a pretty funky instruction set - looked a lot more
> like microcode than a traditional ISA.
>
> That is my point. Of course anything that is implemented can be
re-implemented, but there are resource limits to this complexity. To a
large team with experience in chip design and production or even FPGA
experience this might be totally possible, like "we just finished designing
this beautiful Core i9 chip let's now take a break for a year and make a
BEAM chip". But in real life such teams are rare, and I'm thinking of 1-3
person team and a _very_ limited budget, there's never enough time or
working hands. Here to succeed one must take a lot of simplifications and
considerations.


> What about if you allow for microcode?  I remember working on microcode
> to extend a MIL-STD-1750 processor, to do pulse train manipulation, for
> electronic warfare applications (back in the day when 4mips was blinding
> fast).  Or what about the LISP machines?
>
> It doesn't seem out of the range of possibility - given a sufficiently
> resourced team.  Now whether it makes economic sense, is a separate
> question.
>

Making these two meet: The price of implementation vs. the available
resources.

>
> Miles Fidelman
>
>
> --
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
>
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