RE: [EXTERNAL] First new vax in ...30 years? :-)

[Luke Brennan <lukeb%microsoft.com@localhost>]

MetaVAX! This is the coolest thing I have heard in years.
Luke

-----Original Message-----
From: port-vax-owner%NetBSD.org@localhost <port-vax-owner%NetBSD.org@localhost> On Behalf Of Anders Magnusson
Sent: Saturday, 3 July 2021 20:14
To: port-vax List <port-vax%NetBSD.org@localhost>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] First new vax in ...30 years? :-)

Hi,

some time ago I ended up in an architectural discussion (risc vs cisc
etc...) and started to think about vax.
Even though the vax is considered the "ultimate cisc" I wondered if its cleanliness and nice instruction set still could be implemented efficient enough.
Well, the only way to know would be to try to implement it :-)  I had an 15-year-old demo board with a small low-end FPGA (Xilinx XC3S400), so I just had to learn Verilog and try to implement something.  And it just passed EVKAA.EXE:

 >FR00000000 200
 >G
EVKAA V10.4 Hardcore Instruction Test

Hit any key to continue
EVKAA   V10.4 pass # 1(X) done!
EVKAA   V10.4 pass # 19(X) done!
EVKAA   V10.4 pass # 32(X) done!
EVKAA   V10.4 pass # 4B(X) done!
EVKAA   V10.4 pass # 64(X) done!
EVKAA   V10.4 pass # 7D(X) done!
EVKAA   V10.4 pass # 96(X) done!
EVKAA   V10.4 pass # AF(X) done!
EVKAA   V10.4 pass # C8(X) done!
EVKAA   V10.4 pass # E1(X) done!^C
Input breakpoint: 000000001
 >

(the microcode console works like the Nova4 microcode console - simpler to implement than the VAX style...) It runs at 50MHz, but could easily be increased to about 80, just to program DCM.

Photo of the "vax": https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ludd.ltu.se%2F~ragge%2Fpics%2FIMG_0837.jpg&amp;data=04%7C01%7Clukeb%40microsoft.com%7Cdc8e3c317f9a4f87bf9908d93e155982%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C637609083731285699%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&amp;sdata=2KyyD8oaCMMUk1v8zJM6yPfCJqNC8zGZJWulBWJjvQg%3D&amp;reserved=0
I had to get a new FPGA board, since I started to get bit errors on the old one, so I bought a chinese board with essentially the same FPGA
(XC3S500E):

I have implemented all addressing modes, the interrupt hierarchy, timers, and 151 instructions.
No memory management yet though, but that should be quite straight-forward.

Currently it uses about 70% of available FPGA resources, which is around
6000 LUTs (which is quite inefficient implemented, since I have learned how to do verilog programming while writing the code...)

I'll follow up this mail with two more, one about the implementation and one about how to go forward with the vax architecture :-)

-- R