I can't imagine the utility of low-power processors that "aren't trying to be energy efficient per operation" and are "really bad at processing" - I thought that was the whole point!
These really are completely different type of computers - I believe if you can apply the MSP430 successfully to your application then the GA144 is probably the wrong chip to use.
But what if you need real-time nano-second reaction times on many separate pins? What if you need to process a 30 Mhz signal? While controlling a display and accepting input? All at the same time?
Then you might need the GA144, which can do all those things at the same time without needing to worry about interrupts or waking up from low power sleep modes or any of the other complex mechanism computers employ to minimize power loss.
I can't imagine the utility of low-power processors that
"aren't trying to be energy efficient per operation"
Consider the Amazon Dash Button.
10 seconds a week running a WiFi radio, TCP/IP, SSL and all that. 604,790 seconds a week waiting for a button to be pressed. Battery powered.
If you can monitor a button on 1 microamp, and run WiFi on 60 milliamps, 50% of your battery capacity will go on sleeping and 50% on waking.
And wake-state power consumption is dominated by the radio module, so the best way to cut down on wake state power consumption is to make the wake as short as possible.
That's the other side of low power devices, and part of the the beauty of asynchronous logic, it does nothing better then anything else! Computers like the ga144 'sleep' mid instruction waiting for a pin (button) to change, consuming only gate leakage for as long as needed.
I think that malanj's point is that the article is disingenuous because it compares the Green Array chip to an MSP430 product under a set of operational conditions specifically designed to maximize the MSP430 power consumption while excluding the many advantages of the MSP430 has in features. The summary of the whitepaper even start with the line, "there are apples and oranges in this comparison."
People always complaining about the cost of the dev board or about how they can't think of a practical application. Maybe those are valid criticisms, but honestly we have something unique here, try not to dismiss it with vapid complaints. This computer and the engineering culture from which it comes is radically different. It's more efficient then anything else I've seen. Sure, it makes some things more complicated to program but makes many other things vastly simpler. It enables a level of software control that approaches the functionality of an FPGA yet retains the interactively of a fully software solution. And it's fun to program, and simple enough to understand everything about it. I wish we had more computers like them
Erlang is a high-level language ideally suited to concurrent (not parallel) computing on multiple cores.
Is there any kind of cross-over here, with GreenArrays processors? Is it feasible to have an Erlang VM running on a GA chip, and would it have any advantages over the current (typically x86) hardware?
(From the Erlang website (http://erlang.org/faq/implementations.html): "Getting Erlang to run on, say, an 8 bit CPU with 32kByte of RAM is not feasible. People successfully run the Ericsson implementation of Erlang on systems with as little as 16MByte of RAM. It is reasonably straightforward to fit Erlang itself into 2MByte of persistant storage (e.g. a flash disk).")
No chance of that, GreenArrays processors are arrays of f18a computers - each of which only has 64 18bit words of RAM. Orders of magnitude less then Erlang requires.
I would start with the product briefs if you want to learn more: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/downindex.html
I meant undesireable in the sense that it takes longer time to develop and harder to debug, but you are absolutely right about the power consumption and speed
These really are completely different type of computers - I believe if you can apply the MSP430 successfully to your application then the GA144 is probably the wrong chip to use.
But what if you need real-time nano-second reaction times on many separate pins? What if you need to process a 30 Mhz signal? While controlling a display and accepting input? All at the same time?
Then you might need the GA144, which can do all those things at the same time without needing to worry about interrupts or waking up from low power sleep modes or any of the other complex mechanism computers employ to minimize power loss.