Saturday, July 6, 2013

Propeller Spin Brain Part 2

MORE ABOUT THE SPIN BRAIN
PROPELLER SPIN BRAIN PART 2
"The Spinning Brain"
Continuing with our previous edition about the Spin Brain, we will look at five Parallax Propeller chips connected together to make a new type of processing machine, examining more elements and specs about this cute little machine.

In this Edition of The Spinning Brain, we will cover
- 5 Chip Inventory
- Processors
- Speed Units
- Related Links

CHIP INVENTORY
Five chips provide for the following useful elements of functional inventory:

5 Chip Inventory
* Five AI individuals (5 chips)
* 40 Deterministic Cores (5x8 Cogs)
* 160 GPIO Pins (5x32)
* 160K RAM (5x32K)
* 160K ROM (5x32)
* 80 Counters (5x16)
* 40 Video Generators (5x8)
* 13,600 MIPS (5x2720 Theoretical)*
* 160 Hard Processors (5x32)
* 5,000 Vprocessors (5x1,000)
* 5,160 Total Processors (5,000+160)
* SPIN, PASM Programming Languages

PROCESSORS
Each Cog is a RISC processor and each chip has eight. Each counter is a processor with exactly one instruction: a conditional ADD. A chip has 16 counters. Each video generator is a processor with one instruction: a Shift by one or two. A chip has eight video generators.

Processors per Chip
08 Cogs
16 Counters
08 Video Generators
32 Total Processors per chip 


SPEED UNITS
MIPS  - Millions instructions per second
DFLOP - D stands for ten      (DECA)
HFLOP - H stands for hundred  (HECTO)
KFLOP - K stands for thousand (KILO)
MFLOP - M stands for million  (MEGA)
GFLOP - G stands for billion  (GIGA)
TFLOP - T stands for trillion (TERA)

13,600 MIPs is 13,600,000,000 IPS or 13.6 billion instructions per second, related to 13.6 GFLOPs. In going from 5 chips to 100: 20x13.6=272 GFLOPS.*

* Note this is a relative theoretical comparison from one Propeller chip to a series of Propellers within the contextual definitions we have established for one chip, and is not intended as a comparison to other machines with other designs.

LINKS
Spin Brain 
Supertronic Spin Brain
FLOPS
Parallax
Propeller Info
Propeller Chip