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Active partial reconfiguration is a thing and works pretty much as you say - some parts of the chip continue running while others are swapped out, and an exampl

Active partial reconfiguration is a thing and works pretty much as you say - some parts of the chip continue running while others are swapped out, and an example use case is video encoding, just swap in the encoder engine optimised to a given standard, rather than have every standard in the same design requiring a much larger device.

ncmncm 6y ago
Thank you. Which devices support active partial configuration? I have not encountered any mention of it, before. The "Three Ages of FPGAs" paper in IEEE has "reconfiguration" in the title of a single reference, and no mention in the text.
- tails4e 6y ago
  It's recently been renamed dynamic function exchange (marketing I guess?) but it'd supported in xilinx 7 series and later: https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vivado/implementation/dynamic-function-exchange.html#deviceSupport https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vivado/implemen...
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    Thank you. The DFX apparatus all looks distressingly proprietary, not to say clumsy. It seems like it will be a long time before this capability leaks out to mainstream use. After it becomes more accessible, one could hope to compile programmatically generated logic on the fly, and immediately configure some chip area to execute it, perhaps with on-demand / JIT swapping between software and hardware implementation. O Brave New World!
    - slrz 6y ago
      Even for moderately complex designs the synthesis times are way too long for that to be feasible. Unfortunately, a lot of it is inherent to the problems/algorithms involved. So getting rid of the clumsiness of proprietary synthesis tools won't be sufficient, you are going to need another breakthrough.
      - ncmncm 6y ago
        It is always easy to invent ways for ambitions to be impractical. But, surprise, those are not the things people actually do with new capabilities. Instead they do clever, sensible things that work for them.

ncmncm 6y ago

Thank you. Which devices support active partial configuration? I have not encountered any mention of it, before. The "Three Ages of FPGAs" paper in IEEE has "reconfiguration" in the title of a single reference, and no mention in the text.

tails4e 6y ago
It's recently been renamed dynamic function exchange (marketing I guess?) but it'd supported in xilinx 7 series and later: https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vivado/implementation/dynamic-function-exchange.html#deviceSupport https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vivado/implemen...
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Thank you. The DFX apparatus all looks distressingly proprietary, not to say clumsy. It seems like it will be a long time before this capability leaks out to mainstream use. After it becomes more accessible, one could hope to compile programmatically generated logic on the fly, and immediately configure some chip area to execute it, perhaps with on-demand / JIT swapping between software and hardware implementation. O Brave New World!
  - slrz 6y ago
    Even for moderately complex designs the synthesis times are way too long for that to be feasible. Unfortunately, a lot of it is inherent to the problems/algorithms involved. So getting rid of the clumsiness of proprietary synthesis tools won't be sufficient, you are going to need another breakthrough.
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      It is always easy to invent ways for ambitions to be impractical. But, surprise, those are not the things people actually do with new capabilities. Instead they do clever, sensible things that work for them.