timofonic Posted January 7, 2010 Report Share Posted January 7, 2010 (edited) Hello. I would like to know if the XCore from XMOS can be an interesting platform for MIDI and music hardware projects, so know the advantages and disadvantages compared to other chips like FPGA and microcontrollers like PIC or Atmel AVR. A fast looking make it a nice platform for many applications, but I would like to know the opinion by people from the MIDIbox community (specially developers). XMOS has developed a family of embedded multi-core multi-threaded processors which resonate strongly with the Transputer and INMOS, named as XCore. Transputer was a pioneering concurrent computing microprocessor design of the 1980s from INMOS, a British semiconductor company based in Bristol. Many considered in the 80s to be the future of computing. Despite being highly influential for news computer architecture ideas, sadly it did not live to the expectation. XMOS is a 2005 founded fabless semiconductor company that manufactures multi-core multi-threaded processors designed to execute several real-time tasks, DSP, and control flow all at once. It's a British company based in Bristol. The XMOS name is a loosely reference to Inmos. The mentioned advantages of the XCore chips from XMOS are mainly the cheaper cost compared to other solutions like FPGA, easier to program and an high level of parallelism even between different chips connected by chain. The XCore family are 32-bit processors, that runs up to 8 concurrent threads per. It was available as of June 2009 running at 400 MHz. Each thread can run at up to 100 MHz; four threads follow each other through the pipeline, resulting in a top speed of 400 MIPS if at least four threads are active. The 400 MIPS of each core is equally distributed over all active threads. This allows the use of extra threads in order to hide latency. There are actually available in two forms, the one core XCore XS1-L1 and the quad core XCore XS1-G4. The first ones has one core, the second has four (quad core). The languages to be programmed can be C, C++ and computer language based on C (plus some similarities with occam) but specific for XMOS chips called XC targetted to fully utilize the capabilities of XCore chips like real time and parallelism. About for MIDIbox-like projects, some people did some easy stuff by porting code to the processor. An example is the XC-1 SID emulator demo. Here you can find a list of current projects. In this youtube video, David May (CTO XMOS and was the chief architect of Transputer from Inmos ) explains the communicating between XMOS proccessors. Another interesting video is this XMOS XK1 modular development board overview. It features David May (XMOS CTO) and Ali Dixon (XMOS Co-Founder) discussing some of the features of the recent XMOS XK1 development board. XCore Exchange was launched in December 2009 and is a site to enable and encourage innovative and entrepreneurial discussion and collaboration. A community about the XMOS processors is XMOSLinkers.org. Regards. Edited January 7, 2010 by timofonic Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lylehaze Posted January 8, 2010 Report Share Posted January 8, 2010 I don't know much about them yet, but my next computer will have one built in. :) LyleHaze Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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