109.721 MHz Yeah!

Just a quickie post. I'd just updated my AEMB processor design today. I have received reports that a previous update of mine had broken something. Where the design was previously running at 70 MHz, it is now only running at 36 MHz or so. So, I thought I'd fix it. While I was in there, I thought that I'd optimise some things as well. All I can say now is, 109.721 MHz, baby!

As I had blogged about earlier, the design debuted at about 50k gates @ 40 MHz. Then, after some optimisation of the ALU and register file, I got it up to about 35k gates @ 70 MHz. The US company that's using it, is running their prototype system at 50 MHz for development. Today's update improved some aspects of the data path and the result is another 50% boost in performance at a discounted cost. It's now 33k gates @ 109.721 MHz!

Smaller, faster, cheaper and better! I'm seriously impressed! This baby of mine can really crunch numbers. And you want to know how long it took me to fix the bug? About 15 minutes to fix it and another 2 hours to verify it with the necessary tools. Cool, ain't it! Alright, I better stop blowing my own trumpet now. I'm just happy (:

PS. It took 2 hours because my computer is slow now. A new MacBook would make it much faster!