First principles, no baggage, simplicity
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Going back to first principles--the essential axiomatic truths of computing--I have sought to find the simplest and smallest circuit that still qualifies as what we would think of as a fully functional general-purpose microprocessor.

The circuit, called "WIZ", is terribly simple. It is based on two fundamental principles:

(1) All computing hardware can be broken down to a set of basic computational objects.
(2) All computing software can be broken down to the communication of data
    from one computational object to another.

The WIZ circuit has no instruction set. It has just one operation, "A to B", which causes data to move from object "A" to object "B".

I can draw the entire circuit on a whiteboard in 10 minutes, and any bright first year engineering student could, without taking notes, go home and duplicate it.

And that is it. That is all there is to the processor, the chip, the network, the entire system: all just move data from "A to B". There are no other capabilities. No other "features".

A WIZ with a few basic 32-bit arithmetic computational objects and some associated logical objects can be constructed from about 100,000 transistors. It is at least as powerful as those 100,000 transistor processors from the 1980's. And like them, can run whole operating systems and languages and applications.

And yet it is small enough to put as many as one million of them onto a single WIZ chip. Indeed, the WIZ processor is designed from the ground up to co-exist in a "sea" of WIZ processors.

The simplicity of the WIZ circuit drops all of the "baggage" of other processors, yet re-attains most of the same functionalities by distributing them into many WIZes.

For example, with so many processors available, we can put every program, subroutine, and program fragment into a different WIZ, and "call" them by moving data ("arguments") from the caller, WIZ "A", to the callee, WIZ "B", and return values or answers from WIZ "B" back to WIZ "A".

Instead of multi-programming or multi-threading we are "multi-WIZing". And thus we can drop all circuitry related to processor sharing. No multi-tasking, no multi-threading, no context switching, no memory management, no interrupt handling.

The WIZ circuit uses no clocks. It can easily exhibit massive parallelism, making it ideally suited for machine learning algorithms.

It runs a unique operating system, called ZOZ (or "wiZ Operating Zystem"). The ZOZ creates a mesh-like network of WIZ chips, and distributes its own code into them. The only network operation is (of course), "A to B", where "A" and "B" are two WIZes on the network.

ZOZ "programs" are sequences of instructions, all of the form "A to B". These sequences are split up into fragments and doled out to various WIZes in various WIZ chips, much like the way a disk operating system doles files out to various tracks on various disk drives. In this respect, WIZes are merely a resource to the ZOZ, to be used as needed.

When the ZOZ selects a WIZ to execute some instructions on, it first loads a hardware test program into that WIZ. Any that fail are removed from the resource pool. Thus yield becomes almost irrelevant, and manufacturing cost can be *extremely* low.

The ZOZ can create multiple copies of a code fragment in multiple WIZes in multiple WIZ chips and compare answers, thus creating high-reliability operations from lower reliability parts. This makes the system radiation tolerant.

As there are no clocks to consume power, any part of a single WIZ or any WIZ on a WIZ chip that is unused or inactive draws no power, making the WIZ chip an extremely low power chip.

The number of WIZes on a WIZ chip is variable. We can manufacture very tiny chips with just a few hundred WIZes each, for simple sensor and control applications, and very large chips with a few million WIZes on them, for more complex or compute-intensive applications.

A tiny WIZ chip with on-chip power and on-chip radio is an optimal "sensor mote". This is a multi-billion dollar industry waiting to happen. 

All of the details of how all of the above can be done, with complete circuit schematics and descriptions of the ZOZ algorithms are here in this on-line "book".

Thanks for being here. I hope you enjoy what you are about to read! My contact info is here too and I will always be happy to talk with you personally!

Steven Swift
Chief Wizard of WIZ, First Zozzer of ZOZ