Announcing Kestrel-4
01 Apr 2016
Based on the recent and wild success of the Kestrel-3 home-brew computer project,
I am happy to announce my next project for the open computing masses.
Say hello to the Kestrel-4.
Specifications
The Kestrel-4 will only slightly be more involved as home-brew projects are concerned.
In particular, it will require completely custom FPGA-based circuit boards
built around both Lattice iCE40K and Xilinx hardware. But it won’t stop there.
I/O Capacity
- Support for 65536 I/O channels, each capable of over 1 Tbps throughput.
- Individual I/O channels can be bonded together to support higher throughputs.
- All I/O channels are backed by lowRISC cores, each with several minion cores dedicated to driving I/O.
- Intelligent routing of traffic works around bottlenecks without programmer or user intervention.
- Base unit will ship with 512 channels installed.
For those who desire the nostalgia of glass teletype screens,
3270-compatible block-mode terminals will be supported through a forth-coming control interface.
Memory Capacity
- ccNUMA architecture with up to 128 independent banks of DDR4 SDRAM memory.
- RapidIO interconnects between all banks and processing elements.
- Each memory bank supports a 66-bit address space; maximum capacity 9.44 ZB of memory!
Processing Capacity
- One PE card Pre-installed with 1024 RISC-V RV128-compatible processors.
- Support for up to 16 PE cards, allowing up to 65536 CPUs.
- All four modes supported: machine, hypervisor, supervisor, user.
- 16-cores per processor die, each sporting 8-way superscalar technology.
- 4GHz per processor for breakneck computational performance.
- 128K of L1 cache per core, 1MB of L2 cache, and 16MB of L3 Cache.
Operating Systems
- Kestrel Forth V4.0 will introduce support for virtual partitions (VPARs), running Linux applications as Forth words.
- Licenses for 1-10 users, 10-100 users, 100+ users.
- Run trusted applications in a single address space for best performance, or in separate address spaces for maximum security.
- Now includes graphical configuration interface.
- Supports interactive and batch jobs.
- Hardware support for BLAZEMONGER technology!
Intended Application Portfolio
The Kestrel-4 will target
financial, insurance, medical, nuclear reclaimation, weather prediction, enterprise file serving, enterprise web cache applications,
as well as Minecraft and Crysis.
Samuel A. Falvo II
Twitter: @SamuelAFalvoII
Google+: +Samuel A. Falvo II
About the Author
Software engineer by day.
Amateur computer engineer by night.
Founded the Kestrel Computer Project as a proof-of-concept back in 2007,
with the Kestrel-1 computer built around the 65816 CPU.
Since then,
he's evolved the design to use a simple stack-architecture CPU with the
Kestrel-2,
and is now in the process of refining the design once more with
a 64-bit RISC-V compatible engine in the Kestrel-3.
Samuel is or was:
- a Forth,
Oberon,
J,
and Go enthusiast.
- an amateur radio operator (KC5TJA/6).
- an amateur photographer.
- an intermittent amateur astronomer, astrophotographer.
- a student of two martial arts (don't worry; he's still rather poor at them, so you're still safe around him. Or not, depending on your point of view).
- a former semiconductor verification technician for the HIPP-II and HIPP-III line of Hifn, Inc. line-speed compression and encryption VLSI chips.
- the co-founder of Armored Internet, a small yet well-respected Internet Service Provider in Carlsbad, CA that, sadly, had to close its doors after three years.
- the author of GCOM, an open-source, Microsoft COM-compatible component runtime environment.
I also made a proprietary fork named Andromeda for Amiga, Inc.'s
AmigaDE
software stack.
It eventually influenced
AmigaOS 4.0's bizarre "interface" concept for exec libraries.
(Please accept my apologies for this architectural blemish;
I warned them not to use it in AmigaOS, but they didn't listen.)
- the former maintainer and contributor to Gophercloud.
- a contributor to Mimic.
Samuel seeks inspirations in many things,
but is particularly moved by those things which moved or enabled him as a child.
These include all things Commodore, Amiga, Atari,
and all those old Radio-Electronics magazines he used to read as a kid.
Today, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his beautiful wife, Steph,
and four cats; 13, 6.5, Tabitha, and Panther.