In message <9408190809.ZM4528@simple.sydney.sgi.com> Ian Farquhar writes:
Actually, I would be surprised if the "SIMD" processors were not a huge array of reprogrammable FPGA's, quite possibly Xilinx's. The possibilities of a large array of these chips, each with local memory, is quite interesting. I have personally seen an array of 64 Xilinx chips in a DEC PeRL box doing RSA, at speeds similar or better to almost all available custom hardware implementations of the cipher.
The delays in getting data on and off the chip are too large and the amount of space wasted in redundant functions is too great. You might prototype it using FPGAs, but even this is unlikely. Why not just buy one of the existing SIMD processors and simulate your target system? People used to build fast processors out of separate chips (bit slices). They don't do that any more because it's too slow and too expensive if you are building in volume. -- +-----------------------------------+--------------------------------------+ | Jim Dixon<jdd@aiki.demon.co.uk> | Compuserve: 100114,1027 | |AIKI Parallel Systems Ltd + parallel processing hardware & software design| | voice +44 272 291 316 | fax +44 272 272 015 | +-----------------------------------+--------------------------------------+