hey all,
the Hydra is nearly out.
No!, not the mystical beast with 5 to 12 heads....an average of 9 heads.
I'm talking about the eight layered cel processor chip from Parallax. The Hydra is a cel processor chip from Parallax.
It took them about eight years to design and crete this chip and as well as the tools and programming languages for the Hydra chip too.
The Hydra propeller contains onboard 8 32-bit CPUs. Each CPU is also called a cog. Each cog(cpu) has 512 32-bit registers and as well as additional hardware support circuitry for better and faster audio and video generation. All the cogs share a global memory area of 64k. 32k of Ram and 32k of Rom. Also, included on the Hydra chip is an additional 128k of EEPROM of memory.
Within the Hydra chip and scheme of things.....there are 'objects'. Objects can be the graphics, the Input/Output, Math and Physic processing, Networking, Music, Sound, and etc.
Each cog can be assigned a separate object to process and handle.
For example...one or 2 cogs can handle the graphics, while another handles the I/O, and still another for the music and sound, and still another for the networking too.
Even more...the cogs do not collide nor interrupt the other cogs work and performance. Also, there are neither any memory interruptions nor collisions.
Real simultaneous mutiprocessing and multitasking. Even parallel programming.
Also, all the cogs can work together on all the objects as one whole program and process too.
I'm really interested in this. Oh yeah, the Hydra game console...which contains the Hydra propeller chip...will be coming out sometime this summer. From xgamestation.
Check it out at www.parallax.com/propeller
cheers,
power mousey
