Anti machine

The Xputer is a design for a reconfigurable computer, proposed by computer scientist Reiner Hartenstein. Hartenstein uses various terms to describe the various innovations in the design, including config-ware, flow-ware, morph-ware, and "anti-machine".

The Xputer represents a move away from the traditional Von Neumann computer architecture, to a coarse-grained "soft Arithmetic logic unit (ALU)" architecture.Parallelism is achieved by configurable elements known as reconfigurable datapath arrays (rDPA), organized in a two-dimensional array of ALU's similar to the KressArray.

The Xputer architecture is data-stream-based, and is the counterpart of the instruction-based von Neumann computer architecture.

The Xputer architecture was one of the first coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures, and consists of a reconfigurable datapath array (rDPA) organized as a two-dimensional array of ALUs (rDPU). The bus-width between ALU's were 32-bit in the first version of the Xputer.

The ALUs (also known as rDPUs) are used for computing a single mathematical operation, such as addition, subtraction or multiplication, and can also be used purely for routing.

ALUs are mesh-connected via three types of connections, and data-flow along these connections are managed by an address generation unit.

Programs for the Xputer are written in the C language, and compiled for usage on the Xputer using the CoDeX compiler written by the author. The CoDeX compiler maps suitable portions of the C program onto the Xputer's rDPA fabric. The remainder of the program is executed on the host system, such as a personal computer.

A reconfigurable datapath array (rDPA) is a semiconductor device containing reconfigurable data path units and programmable interconnects, first proposed by Rainer Kress in 1993, at the University of Kaiserslautern.

Instead of FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) having single bit configurable logic blocks (CLBs), rDPAs have multiple bits wide (for instance, 32 bit path width) reconfigurable datapath units (rDPUs).

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