Tyler Durden <camera_lumina@hotmail.com> wrote:
Well, maybe I misunderstand your statement here, but in Telecom most heavy iron has plenty of FPGAs, and as far as I understand it, they more or less have to.
Have to in what sense? If they're constantly reconfiguring the FPGAs (new software revs, or some sort of evolutionary "learning" process--- the latter not likely in telecom, of course), sure, they have to be on reprogrammable structures. If, on the other hand, you're building a custom hash cracking machine, you don't need to reconfigure your gates. You could design your parallelized SHA1 cracking machine and dump it onto a bunch of FPGAs, but if you really have unlimited resources you take the plunge into ASICs, at which point you can tighten your timing substantially. -- Riad S. Wahby rsw@jfet.org