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From: darek <darek.maksimiuk@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: a multicore XMOS CPU
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2010 11:10:32 -0800 (PST)
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Date: 2010-02-10T11:10:32-08:00
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Hi All,
 some time ago I have  discovered  very interesting CPU architecture
developed at Bristol University (some of you still remember
transputers) (http://www.xmos.com/).
The CPU has 4 cores connected via an internal bus and every core can
run up to 8 real-time threads per core
(http://www.xmos.com/technology/silicon-technology). An internal clock
@100MHz gives time resolution of 10ns.

More about the architecture can be found here: http://www.xmos.com/support/documentation
.

Well, I could not resist  and I got this evaluation board (https://
www.xmos.com/products/development-kits/xc-2-ethernet-kit).

The company provides the whole set of development tools (https://
www.xmos.com/technology/design-tools) at no cost, and the tool chain
is GNU based (there is also an extended C compiler that supports
allocation of tasks  at the core level).
I am willing to dedicate some of my free time to   try to port Ada
compiler to this platform.
Some thing, however, are not quite clear to my. For example:
  1. How to distribute  tasks between cores ? It is responsibility of
the Ada run-time or the programmer shall do it explicitly (each core
up to 8 real-time threads) via pragmas (I think, extending the
language definition is not a good idea)?
 2. Is it possible to create from publicly available source GNAT code
a system that does not require any OS support (a bare metal solution)?
3. Last but not least. Is this enterprise worth  any efforts (nice
hobby project but then ...) ?

I hope, that there would be some wise advices  around ....

Cheers,
  Darek

P.S. Imagine an Ada program running on this device:
https://www.xmos.com/products/development-kits/xmp-64