The Metaforth Computer

I received a brochure today from the Metaforth people, who are building
a high-end Forth machine in England and are now apparently ready to start
shipping systems.  The Metaforth group is headed by Alan Winfield, the
author of the book "The Complete Forth" and a widely respected engineer
and Forth expert.  
 
The Metaforth MF1600VME card (their first product) is a rather expensive
Forth engine, built on a VME bus card, costing around $7000.  It runs
at 20 mHz, has a 24-bit address bus and a 16-bit data bus.  Comes with
sophisticated software including a multi-tasking multi-user kernel, 
Forth system/application metacompiler, debugging tools, and an application
profiler that will let you analyze an application and adjust the CPU's
microcode to increase execution speed!  A C and Pascal compiler are also
available, they generate high level Forth as their "intermediate code",
which is then compiled directly to the CPU's machine code (which is a 
fairly close mapping).  
 
Benchmarks given in the brochure are (they are in a bar graph so I
am estimating the numbers):

Byte benchmark, 10 iterations ...
Metaforth CPU    0.45 sec.
CDC Cyber 760    0.75 sec.
68020            1.4 sec.
VAX 11/780       1.45 sec.
Intel 286        3.8 sec.

Some other timings given:  time to execute 1 million DO LOOPS, 0.40 sec. 
(compare with 1.7 sec for 68020 and 12.6 sec for 80286); time for one
subroutine call/return 800 nanosec (compare with 2.04 microsec for 68000).
 
In summary this is a high-performance VME based computer which happens
to support the Forth language directly.  It is not a microcontroller but
a full-fledged development system with all necessary system tools.
 
I have not seen one of these machines myself but our distributor in 
Germany (Klaus Flesch) visited Winfield's group about a week ago and
used one of the machines, ran some benchmarks, and tried out the FOrth
and C compilers.  He was very impressed with it.  
 
The Metaforth people can be contacted at:
 
 Metaforth Computer Systems Ltd.
 Newlands High Technology Centre
 Inglemire Lane
 Hull, ENGLAND HU6 7TQ
 Phone: 0482 855927
 
THIS MESSAGE IS NOT A REVIEW.  Neither I (Ray Duncan) or my company
(Laboratory Microsystems Inc.) have any business affiliation with
Metaforth Computer Systems.  THIS MESSAGE IS PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL
PURPOSES ONLY and more detailed and accurate information should be
obtained by contacting Metaforth Computer Systems Ltd. directly.