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Anything they want. I think it's like having a blank breadboard circuit, Microsoft can mock up a new purpose designed chip and program it in to these FPGAs inst
by Neeek 10y ago
Anything they want. I think it's like having a blank breadboard circuit, Microsoft can mock up a new purpose designed chip and program it in to these FPGAs instead of having to fab one up from scratch.
It's hard to tell from the article though, I'm just guessing.
- j1vms 10y agoThere are resource limitations to contend with, roughly like an limit on total number of logic gates (e.g. AND, NOR,..) that can be "rewired", and also the bus speed to memory can become prohibitive for some applications. This is why GPUs have been so successful at the subset of problems they are targeted at, just like GPUs as compared to CPUs. However, FPGAs are becoming ever more malleable and heterogeneous: the embedded toolkit (like on-chip hardwired DSPs) is expanding, and the potential for live reconfiguration of parts of an FPGA while other parts are in-use (dynamic/active partial reconfiguration) [0] is pretty exciting. Edit: Though I think it was not mentioned in the article, Microsoft and Intel/Altera have indeed gone this route in no small part due to the empirical death of Moore's Law (which has gone much discussed on HN over the past few years). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconfigurable_computing#Partial_re-configuration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconfigurable_computing#Parti...
- Neeek 10y agoYeah, not thinking they are all powerful, just sounds like they can be fine tuned easier than designing a whole new for-purpose chips. Thank you for the info though!