Bitgrid

I have this weird architecture I'm emulating that I call a bit-grid.[1] The basic idea is an FPGA with NO routing fabric at all... just a 2d grid of look up tables that take a single bit input from each neighbor, and output a single bit to each, which means each look up table holds 64 bits (4*16 possible input states) of "program". Clocking is in two phases (like the colors of a chess board) to prevent all manner of grief, and make it easier to think about. Each phase is NOT Turning Complete, but the grid is. So, I can emulate this thing on my desktop PC at about 28 nSec/cell using some Pascal code[2]. I'm thinking that if I upgrade to a machine with AVX512 instructions, it might get radically faster. What I can't figure out is how this instruction actually works, and what gains I would actually get. The Intel documentation on this inst

Well, you can use a bitgrid (which is an array of 4 input/4 output bit lookup tables, clocked like the colors of a chess board) to implement the game of life. (Someone else did it for me!)[1] There are several nice properties of a bitgrid, which include fault tolerance (you can route around bad cells), easy security guarantees (as you can wall off sections of "code"), and almost trivial routing (as opposed to the huge times that FPGAs take to route, due to heterogeneity of their hardware) If you need to rotate, invert, or even interleave designs, you can. I've been coding up a simulator in Pascal[2]. It doesn't do much, but it executes at 25 nSec/cell in emulation on my machine. I can execute a 32x32 bitgrid at about 40 khz, almost fast enough to play with audio. A real bitgrid computer (in a cluster) should be capable of sustaining Exaf

BitGrid - it's an old idea, that has haunted me since the 1980s. This latest incarnation is in Lazarus/FPC, and up on github.[1] I was prodded into action when a friend showed me the BitGrid page on the Esolang Wiki[2] I was blown away that someone had figured out how to do the Game of Life in a bitgrid... more than I've done myself. I can simulate a 1024x1024 grid at 15 Hz clock rate, which should be plenty fast to do some interesting things. The emulation works, I have a tiny little test program that allows me to me reasonably sure of that (it's just shuffling bits around, nothing complex). I have ZERO support software for it... need to write some things, like a console, cycle counter, method for I/O, etc. It's like finding yourself with a new IMSAI in the 1970s, with no I/O, or anything... just RAM, CPU, Toggle Switches, and BlinkenLi