The 144-core Charles Moore processor went on sale for $ 20

Charles Moore, creator of the Forth programming language, brought a unique development to the industrial production stage - the multi-core GA144 processor. Chip size 10x10 mm has already gone on sale at a price of $ 20 (when ordering from ten pieces), also available motherboards for it. In fact, this is the hardware embodiment of the Fort programming language itself.

An extremely unusual processor for a number of parameters is unmatched among CPUs:

• 144 independent cores, which are activated only upon receipt of instructions, that is, this processor does not have such a characteristic as “clock frequency”;
• the speed of execution of instructions is 1400 picoseconds (equivalent to 700 MHz);
• power consumption of 7 picojoules per instruction;
• power consumption in the "sleep" mode is less than 100 NW;

Multi-level programming allows you to write a very fast and simple microcode, or use a high-level programming language, or combine both of these methods in clusters of computational cores with an indication of “hosts” and “coprocessors” among them.

Chuck developed this processor on his own using the OKAD II VLSI toolkit he himself created. Development tools under GA144, including the assembler / compiler and source code examples, are distributed free of charge in a package under the general name arrayForth.
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Experts are trying to understand what are the target applications of GA144. There are many options:

• robotics (manipulators, artificial limbs, autonomous mobile robots);
• artificial intelligence and neural networks (classification, recognition of signals / images);
• "Onboard systems" (state diagnostics in real time, motion control);
• “Academic” application (hardware for digital signal processing, parallel programming, computing systems architecture);
• speech recognition and synthesis;
• signal modulators / demodulators.

The processor developer himself complements this list with various energy efficient applications (wireless power receiving module), portable devices, image processing systems, sophisticated control systems, cryptography, high-performance signal processing, simulation and synthesis programs, and other applications that need mass parallelism.

GA144 Architecture (PDF)
ArrayForth Guide (PDF)