Abstract
The ICM (Inference Crunching Machines) Project is a research project conducted at ECRC to design and evaluate the architectures of processors dedicated to Prolog. Although there is a real trend in developing co-processors for AI, little has been done to tailor the abstract Prolog machines known in the literature to the real features of existing hardware. ICM3 is one example of such an effort to modify the software Prolog machine, leading to a powerful and efficient implementation in hardware. After an introduction giving the framework of the ICM Project, we describe the modified abstract machine, then the architecture of ICM3, emphasizing its unique features (asynchronous prefetch unit, dereferencing and unification unit). Some functional and gate level simulation results follow. We conclude with comments on what we learned from ICM3, and introduce the next project under way at ECRC, in the Computer Architecture Group.
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© 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston
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Noyé, J., Syre, JC. (1988). ICM3: Design and evaluation of an Inference Crunching Machine. In: Kitsuregawa, M., Tanaka, H. (eds) Database Machines and Knowledge Base Machines. The Kluwer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, vol 43. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1679-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1679-4_1
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