Re: [oc] Beyond Transmeta...

[Suboner@aol.com]

> As Jon Beniston mentioned, it is certainly worth studying the old
> connection machine designs:
> 
>    http://www.jps.net/ethelen/comp-hist/connection-machine.html

Thank you (and you to Jon Beniston) for the information. I believe I have 
seen this or have come across it before at some time. Or in some artificial 
intelegence article I may have heard about a matrix.

> Yet another related idea is the BitBLT instruction created by Dan
> Ingalls on the old Xerox Alto computer (1973) and which is the heart of
> all 2D graphics accelerators. The instruction moved a block of bits
> from a source image to a destination image, and its operation was
> indicated by 4 bits, one of which was selected to be the new
> destination bit depending on the previous value of the destination and
> the value of the source bit (exactly your idea). Dan Ingalls showed how
> to use this to add together a whole vector of numbers in just a few
> instructions with no loop (to implement a cellular automata - the
> famous "game of life") in an article in the August 1981 Byte magazine,
> so I gave serious consideration to building a machine that had no other
>math instructions but this one.

Well, I'm not surprised, its a kind of basic logic that can be used to create 
higher forms of logic. It would be cool to have a network of bits that 
represent the screen, in a bitblt kind of manner, but as a sort of pixel 
pipeline.