Scientific American had a fairly high level treatment of FPGAs recently. They mentioned ways they could be used in conjuction with standard CPUs. The author predicts that within 5 or so years, we'll be seeing hybrid systems using FPGAs in common use. ------------------------ From: Decius 6i5 <decius@ninja.techwood.org> Subject: geodesic -- FPGAs Date: Mon, 21 Jul 1997 06:58:56 -0400 (EDT) To: cypherpunks@toad.com
I've been reading the Geodesic systems thread with much interest... I've been playing around with FPGAs recently, Field Programmable Gate Arrays, which list members should be familiar with due to discussions concerning cheap hardware crypto. Why not replace your entire architecture with reconfigurable hardware? This is sort of like Java turned upside down. Instead of having generalized code running on a specialized "virtual machine." (Which is inefficient as hell) Why not ship the architecture your program runs on along with the program. Liquid architecture. If the FPGA's are standardized (not likely, but..) you could run whatever kind of software you wanted and the architecture would automatically reconfigure to run the code and would be optimized for your application. There are some challenges with muti-tasking but I think you could manage the gate-space like you do memory. Web searches on FGPAs will bring you to research being done on this sort of thing...
-- */^\* Tom Cross AKA Decius 615 AKA The White Ninja */^\* Decius@ninja.techwood.org
"If the economic, social and political conditions... do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security... powerful tendencies arise to escape from freedom into submission." -- Erich Fromm
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