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Comment by wanderingjew

> On the technical side, somewhat more recent FPGA 'placement' algorithms used a simulated annealing algorithm, while what you didn't isn't about placement, that approach could posisbly help with 'net cross-over reduction' type of passes, and maybe help with designs where you can do port swap / pin swap.

Yeah, that was the first step in creating the netlist for the backplane. Simulated annealing on the 8196 nets. TO BE FAIR, this would be a lot easier to route if I didn't explicitly want each of the 16 cards to be identical, but I think that's the most cost-effective way to do it.

As far as an FPGA.... I don't know if I see the point. The nodes in the original CM-1 were basically _only_ ALUs. Very little processing power. The CM-5 was a little better, but this entire thing is batshit crazy. I might as well go for four thousand individually programmable cores. Like, what even is a MISD computer? I have no idea, so lets build one. See what it can actually do.

parent wanderingjew 11 months ago

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