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• Recent thoughts

  Ken KD5ZXG • 01/01/2021 at 05:28 • 0 comments

  32 Gigabit are available now, which would allow simultaneous parallel flags and greatly simplify how flags work at pain of higher price and wasteful utilization of the extra table space. Savings of my time and sanity may be worth the sacrifice certain ideals.

  Also given some thought how busses fit together to make a CPU. I wish a pair of 32Kx8 SRAMs to ambidextrously feed registered arguments to this ALU's address bus. A latch at the exit will grab the result while tables are busy feeding valid address to other tables.

  Latch can write the lookup back to either register bank, neither if only checking a flag, or mirror to both for later ambidextrous read.

  8 way MUX will select a current flag output or preserved older state. Allowing choice of Zero, Carry, HalfCarry, Overflow, Sign, Odd, Old, and perhaps one other flag not yet decided. 

  Selected flag and branching option (true, false, always, never) may then skip over the next instruction (for example a long jump) without wasting time to fetch and dismiss it. Decision is not triggered by the instruction being skipped.

  Getting tired. I need to sleep on this plan and revise tomorrow. 

• Packed Flags

  Ken KD5ZXG • 07/05/2020 at 11:57 • 0 comments

  Simultaneous conventional flag output from one device can be had at the loss of Carry Select and eight alternate tables. I have a plan B, called "packed flags", to store much more efficiently. But doesn't allow simultaneous output and still wants at least two tables to hold them.

  Collision of byte A vs byte B nets 16 all purpose flags, with no operation specified but "flag lookup". We may choose not to waste time examining bytewise results that supposedly threw these flags. Just knowing the flag might be enough. But which 16 flags? Thats the important question. Some possibilities:

  Carry((A+B)+0) aka A+B>0xFF
  Carry((A+B)+1) aka A+B>0xFE
  Borrow((A-B)-0) aka A<B
  Borrow((A-B)-1) aka A<=B
  Borrow((B-A)-0) aka A>B
  Borrow((B-A)-1) aka A=>B
  FunFlag(A,B,0) whatever bit might rotate or swap out of a single byte function sans carry
  FunFlag(A,B,1) whatever bit might rotate or swap out of a single byte function with carry
  A=B+1
  A=B-1
  A=B aka Compare's Zero (Might get the axe in favor of an external NOR gate that checks Zero of any operation)

  Well, that's ten or eleven of sixteen. Got plenty more ideas, but they are all sort of goofy. Do I really need a flag bit that tells if AB is prime? Yeah, that sort of goofy... More old notes to consult. Practical ideas must have passed my mind at some point.

  All functions that make the cut must prove worthy. Like some rotations seem redundant to multiply and divide, you wouldn't expect duplicate entries to be wasted on them. Unless they need to throw a flag, which multiply can't do.

  Ten plus Overflow flags for six flavors of math could make sixteen. But who actually uses overflow, seriously? Don't want a half carry since BCD to BIN and BIN to BCD tables don't need one. Don't need a negative flag, since any bit of any lookup can direct branching, just branch on the sign. 

  Interrupt status can't be looked up in a table, would make no sense to pack those as pre-calculated flags. Maybe they should work in the same manner as the external gate that tests for Zero. Has Zero now become an interrupt?

  I've got enough flags to fill a table and call it quits, I just want six BETTER choices than useless overflows...

• Reasoning

  Ken KD5ZXG • 07/04/2020 at 17:28 • 0 comments

  I have an old 3V Rasberry to generate and bit bang those tables. It doesn't quite offer enough IO to bang the whole device at once without multiplexing. No reason they have to all be banged at once. Manual multiplexing may work just fine.

  Reason for carry selecting an output buffer after lookup rather than feeding an address bit was because a lookup takes 35nS and can't start till we know the address. Output buffers can probably be enabled/disabled much faster (I still need to test that theory). Carry could still be figuring itself out while dual lookups get a speculative head start in parallel. Maybe your instruction wanted gates on the side to clear or invert that carry? Now you got time...

  Tables offer more function than would horribly clutter an instruction set. Some are best looked up programmatically. Could also serve a coprocessor role, perhaps for a relay computer that lacks a hardwired rotate right. Generating those tables might be a challenge within reason for any primitive machine, thus using them afterward won't be a total cheat.

• Rotations etc

  Ken KD5ZXG • 07/04/2020 at 17:23 • 1 comment

  ***Breakdown of Single Input Functions***
  Some may use Carry Select as an extra input.
  Many spread across multiple tables for extra inputs, designated M & N.

  At this point, we have burned exactly 128+128 of our 256+256 functions.
  

  What the heck did I hit my head on when I hallucinated an arithmetic shift with carry?

  Probably meant that carry would backfill to the left. Just as MSB would backfill ASR.

  Temporarily counting other useful tables, not yet organized to assign codes.

  1 Reverse 01234567 to 76543210
  1 Convert BIN to CDH (Coded decimal high, hundreds only)
  1 Convert BIN to CDL (Coded decimal low , tens and ones)
  1 Convert CDL to BIN
  1 Convert BIN to GRY
  1 Convert GRY to BIN
  1 Convert SGN to TWC
  1 Convert TWC to SGN
  1 Count Leading Zeros
  1 Count Leading Ones
  1 Count Trailing Zeros
  1 Count Trailing Ones
  2 Count All Zeros including Carry
  2 Count All Ones including Carry
  10 ASCII Terminal Font (as 10 lines of 8 dots)
  2  ASCII Fourteen Segment Font (plus two : dots)
  2  ASCII Sixteen Segment Font (if you want dots, reference the 14Segment Font)
  2  88 piano keys to 16bit half wavelength at 3.579545MHz Color Burst
      87 tones halfway between piano keys (Quartertones)
      59 Bohlen Pierce (13 tones per Tritave)
      22 Shrutis (of exact fractions to the tonic)
  4  Wolfram's Rule #30 with bookend bits MxxxxxxxxN
  4  Wolfram's Rule #90 with bookend bits MxxxxxxxxN
  --
  40

  216 single input functions for now, leaving 55KB as yet undefined

• Old notes

  Ken KD5ZXG • 07/04/2020 at 05:52 • 0 comments

  I've scraped together a few of my old notes.
  Imported TXT doesn't seem to column well.
  I've done a poor job of fixing those columns. 

  Start by assuming a 16Megabit device
  perhaps with a small helper for flags
  allocating address space to 32 tables:

  ***The Grand Table of Tables***
  Note fixed point byte positons HL . XYZ

  _L.___ ADD(A+(B+0))  _L.___ ADD(A+(B+1))   Flag outputs to be stored separately
  _L.___ SUB(A-(B+0))   _L.___ SUB(A-(B+1))
  _L.___ RSB(B-(A+0))   _L.___ RSB(B-(A+1))      Reverse subtract
  _L.___ FUN(A,B,0)      _L.___ FUN(A,B,1)        256+256 single input functions
  ---Below this line need not store or throw flags, detect zero with a logic gate---
  _L.___ A                     _L.___ B                       MUX(A,B) 
  _L.___ OR (A,B)          _L.___ XOR(A,B)
  _L.___ AND(A,B)        _L.___ NOR(A,B)
  H_.___ INC(AB+1)       _L.___ INC(AB+1)        16bit count, bypassing 8bit carry
  H_.___ DEC(AB-1)      _L.___ DEC(AB-1)
  H_.___ MUL(A*B)       _L.___ MUL(A*B)
  _L.___ DIV(A/B)         __.X__ DIV(A/B)
  __._Y_ DIV(A/B)         __.__Z DIV(A/B)
  _L.___ MOD(A/B)       __.X__ COS(AB)
  __._Y_ COS(AB)        __.__Z COS(AB)           Let AB represent the 1st quadrant
  _L.___ SQR(AB)         __.X__ SQR(AB)
  __._Y_ SQR(AB)        __.__Z SQR(AB)

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