4 ms·

I've been thinking of something similar recently - to extend your idea slightly, why couldn't the flashing of the FPGA happen per tick? Thus at every tick your

I've been thinking of something similar recently - to extend your idea slightly, why couldn't the flashing of the FPGA happen per tick? Thus at every tick your FPGA could become entirely different hardware, tailored to whatever task is required at that tick.

katastic 9y ago
Well, flashing is pretty slow compared to modern computers. You have to load it from flash (no pun) memory and Altera are the only ones (AFAIK) that support only changing subsections. (Which could be great because you can change only a half or quarter of your FPGA with new logic units while the others keep running.) Also, you'd have to know what you'd need... before you need it. Which is kind of impossible. By time you know you need tons of integer units, you probably could have started working on them. That is, if you need to rapidly switch, then your workload is pretty rapidly completed to begin with. However, I don't thing they need to reconfigure that fast. Once every second would be enough to keep up with most workloads. Most "heavy duty" workloads aren't changing that rapidly. You load a video game, it's a videogame for hours you play it. You load a web server, you're going to be doing SSL. If you need much more fine control, it'd probably be better to treat the problem at a much higher level ("I need more SSL keys / sec", instead of "I need more integer adds to make SSL keys") or add another FPGA (one for each use case or set of use cases, ala one for web server keys, one for deciding some other major web server feature). Of course, I'm no expert in the field. I'm just a guy with an idea and some experience / research into FPGA's as reconfigurable logic units.
- Boothroid 9y ago
  Yes, it's the predictive aspect of it that I've struggled with also! I understand there are technical limitations at present, was just trying to extend the idea beyond what's currently possible to see if it might be interesting.

katastic 9y ago

Well, flashing is pretty slow compared to modern computers. You have to load it from flash (no pun) memory and Altera are the only ones (AFAIK) that support only changing subsections. (Which could be great because you can change only a half or quarter of your FPGA with new logic units while the others keep running.) Also, you'd have to know what you'd need... before you need it. Which is kind of impossible. By time you know you need tons of integer units, you probably could have started working on them. That is, if you need to rapidly switch, then your workload is pretty rapidly completed to begin with. However, I don't thing they need to reconfigure that fast. Once every second would be enough to keep up with most workloads. Most "heavy duty" workloads aren't changing that rapidly. You load a video game, it's a videogame for hours you play it. You load a web server, you're going to be doing SSL. If you need much more fine control, it'd probably be better to treat the problem at a much higher level ("I need more SSL keys / sec", instead of "I need more integer adds to make SSL keys") or add another FPGA (one for each use case or set of use cases, ala one for web server keys, one for deciding some other major web server feature). Of course, I'm no expert in the field. I'm just a guy with an idea and some experience / research into FPGA's as reconfigurable logic units.

Boothroid 9y ago
Yes, it's the predictive aspect of it that I've struggled with also! I understand there are technical limitations at present, was just trying to extend the idea beyond what's currently possible to see if it might be interesting.