Archive for February 13th, 2009

Project Utopium

For just over two weeks now I have been designing an asynchronous processor. The working name is “Utopium” (a play on “Lutonium“). It’s an 8051 Currently I am completing the instruction set.

There is a nice instruction set table I am using to mark which instructions it can currently execute. Everything highlighted in pink is done. This was the state on the 6th of February:

utopium_6feb

This was the state on the 11th of February:

utopium_11feb

And finally this is now (13th February):

utopium_13feb

The easy common instructions are done, so that just leaves the reather nasty ones which will be like pushing a pea up a mountain using my nose. So far I learned two things:

  1. The 8 bit micros were designed by either a higher power which I cannot hope to comprehend, or they are a result of top secret illegal government experiments involving LSD and computer engineers.
  2. I should have used the highlighter with most ink.

So far it is 13,948 gates but that should hopefuly go down a bit once I do slightley more intelligent caches although it will also go up once I implement all the instructions. And the performance is a fantastic 30 MIPS which will go up quite a bit once I add the half bufffers.