This is quite interesting. I wonder how capable the platform will be. The article doesn't have many details, unfortunately. Several years ago I was looking for

This is quite interesting. I wonder how capable the platform will be. The article doesn't have many details, unfortunately. Several years ago I was looking for a chip we could use in a set-top box design. We wanted low-power high-performance H.264 decoding. We talked to a very interesting company — Stretch Inc. (http://stretchinc.com/ http://stretchinc.com/), they've been developing something similar for many years now. They basically have a CPU with a tightly-integrated FPGA within. Problem is, the devil is in the details. While FPGAs can theoretically provide impressive acceleration, what ends up mattering is whether you can get them data to process fast enough, what the latencies are, what the interfaces are, and how much easily-accessible memory you have on the FPGA die. That's for the easier algorithms which are mostly CPU-bound. For memory-bound algorithms what really matters is the DMA engine. That is something Intel never got right, which is why you see Texas Instruments DSPs in most embedded applications. If you want to have predictable high-throughput data processing, you need to be in control of your caches. That means a multichannel DMA engine that lets you schedule reads ahead of time and precisely control what is in your L1/L2 at any given time. The ubiquitous n-way set associative caches are great for general-purpose code, but end up being wildly unpredictable for DSP-type stuff. Another factor with FPGAs is how quickly they can be reconfigured — how quickly can you switch the code inside? Can you use the FPGA for several parts of your data pipeline, or does the reconfiguration take so long that it becomes impractical to switch? So, I will be very interested in what the details are — but for the moment color me skeptical. It took Stretch many years to get to a well-designed architecture and even that wasn't right for all purposes. And Intel isn't known for experience with DSPs, which really matters here. Note I didn't even mention compiler support, OS support and how the FPGA is actually to be programmed. I consider those to be secondary to actual hardware performance.