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Scaling down

05/26/2009

My "first approach to implementation" proved to be unscalable (in practical sense at least). However it seems conceptually valid to me. I don't want to discard the "all-for-one" policy nor the "multi-dimensional Trans Matrix" because those ideas still look fine to me.

Nevertheless I looked for different approaches. I saw for instance that real-world systems place Page Tables in Main Memory (not in separate circuits as Magic-1 does) and that the OS takes care of memory allocation and that kind of complicated things.

My focus during this research phase is in hardware design: I need to produce the specification for the hardware. Software development is far, far away in the future; however, I have to leave room in the specification for that future. That is my challenge.

Most of the time, then, the decision making is about who is going to take care of what (and more or less, how) so I could specify the right CPU support for the system software to come.

Back to my "First Approach to Implementation", what I decided today was to scale the architecture down to manageable figures. I don't plan to make a desktop machine; this will be a mainframe-style computer... no video card, no mouse... ok?

My findings are in this note: