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FullyFunctional

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FullyFunctional
·il y a 3 mois·discuss
Ollama made it trivial for me to use claude code on my 48GB MacMini M4P with any model, including the Qwen3.5…nvfp4 which was so far the best I’ve tried. Once Ollama has a Mac friendly version of Gemma4 I’ll jump right on board (and do educate me if I’m missing something).
FullyFunctional
·il y a 3 mois·discuss
absolute n00b here is very confused about the many variations; it looks like the Mac optimized MX versions aren’t available in Ollama yet (I mostly use claude code with this)
FullyFunctional
·il y a 5 mois·discuss
Thanks :) I’ll try to remember
FullyFunctional
·il y a 5 mois·discuss
> AV1 on RK3576, which has very preliminary support

This peaked my interest, but I have no idea which device might have a RK3576
FullyFunctional
·il y a 8 mois·discuss
Backwards. The incompetent Transmeta board picked a VP from NVIDIA to be the CEO and his first action was to kill the IBM contract and move to TSMC, and forced TSMC to use a new unqualified process. This left us without chips to sell for over a year and notebook venders were furious and never returned.

This is what killed Transmeta, not all the technical details.
FullyFunctional
·il y a 8 mois·discuss
The Dynamo project was the genesis of a similar effort at Sun Microsystems which was the genesis of Transmeta Corp (all founders came from Sun). The question remains if the original study was flawed or if the situation was just too different for our x86 workloads.
FullyFunctional
·il y a 9 mois·discuss
I wrote an entire graphical Go-game tree based editor in Lisp, with a stylus on PalmPilot. I considered it an artistic expression.
FullyFunctional
·il y a 9 mois·discuss
As I hate tapping on glass, mistyping non-stop, I’m always evaluating options. This is an awesome project and a great write up, but we want more! :) Please consider published a video so we might see it in action (also showing the build process would be appreciated).
FullyFunctional
·il y a 9 mois·discuss
Twiddler really isn’t the same product at all
FullyFunctional
·il y a 9 mois·discuss
Yes, but this is way beyond that IMO. Really lovely project that I of course must build
FullyFunctional
·il y a 3 ans·discuss
I've been on a physical iPhone keyboard quest since I got my first (4S). I have a pile of BT keyboards and one keyboard case. Still looking for something I would actually use. Indeed, my primary use case is for SSH (via Terminus).
FullyFunctional
·il y a 4 ans·discuss
Ah I miss the old Byte Magazine (like people miss the NES or PS1 etc). The ads looks completely insane with 2022 glasses on - who'd buy a random 64 KB ram extension for an S-100 bus? What was the market for this? Couldn't have been large.
FullyFunctional
·il y a 9 ans·discuss
(EDIT: typos galore)

Thank you. Boy, this was a long time ago and I haven't written anything. I suspect it will be obvious for anyone skilled in the act, but I had to go look at my code at bit to remember some of this.

First a quick word from the POV of a compiler: the register windows are supposed to make function call easier and I suppose it works as designed for hand written code, but it actually adds a lot of complexity to indirect call/virtual functions and is a disaster for anything that switches stack (context switches, coroutines, etc). Another problem is the immediate fields which are just 8-bit unsigned, very often too small. And in practical terms, the GCC port really struggles to make good code for MMIX. Try it!

From the implementation POV: even ignoring the resource requirement for the full MMIX (which besides 256 registers includes a LOT of functionality), it's hard to pipeline as MMIX actually have fairly complicated semantics; just look at the state machine, the S_XXX symbols in https://github.com/tommythorn/fpgammix/blob/master/rtl/core.... While you can obviously deal with that (as witnessed by x86), it requires you to speculate a lot (for starters, speculate that you didn't get an interrupt). All speculation add complication as you need to recover from mis-speculation. This in term hurts cycle time by making stages more complicated and is a MAJOR source of verification work (AKA bugs).

My implementation is nearly completely un-pipelined, very similar to a simple interpreter but in Verilog. Once I had enough functionality that I could look back and consider a more realistic implementation, I really lost the enthusiasm and instead focused on MIPS which is dramatically more efficient and easier to implement (pesky branch delay-slot not withstanding). Of course, later a friend leaked word of nascent RISC-V and the world was forever different.

I actually asked Don directly why he hadn't gone with something like MIPS, but he answered vaguely that he wanted something for education.

On the positive side, I found a bug and scored a $2.56 check (real dollars) and a couple of MMIX T-shirts :)
FullyFunctional
·il y a 9 ans·discuss
If you consider an FPGA board real hardware, then yes, I've run MMIX programs, including graphics, on real hardware: https://github.com/tommythorn/fpgammix Caveats: this is some of the worst Verilog I've even written; I was explicitly racing ahead learning about MMIX as I went along. In the end I had a large subset (integer usermode) when I abandoned it. As much as I wanted to like it, it's really a pretty terrible architecture from most perspectives: it's impossible to scale down, hard to scale up, and nearly impossible to generate good code for. In contrast, RISC-V is IMO the nicest RISC ISA ever design.