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There is a difference between transistors and gates. FPGA's implement gates (i.e. "and", "or", "xor", "not", but really they're all only nand). Generally on a s
by pilom 15y ago
There is a difference between transistors and gates. FPGA's implement gates (i.e. "and", "or", "xor", "not", but really they're all only nand). Generally on a standard processor, one gate is approximately 2 transistors (assuming a CMOS process). So theoretically this FPGA could implement approximately 4 P3's. 10 million transistors ~= 5 million gates.
However, the process of implementing circuits in an FPGA isn't that efficient (processors can do a lot of tricks to get better than 2 transistors/gate. They can also do other tricks to do calculations with just transistors instead of gates and FPGA's can't). However given the 4x overhead, I would say, yes, theoretically an Intel engineer with a full spec and some really good VHDL (the programming language of FPGAs) skills could implement a P3 on this.
- ajross 15y agoFPGA parts don't model gates, actually. Their unit is a giant array of SRAM lookup table (two bits wide by 5 address bits I think?) plus some interconnect logic that you can "wire up" by setting more bits in other SRAM cells. They translate this into "gates" with some marketing cookery as the number of logic gates that would be required to duplicate the most complicated configuration. So when they say "20 million gates", they don't actually mean that any 20M-gate circuit can be built. It depends on what you're doing; some things (e.g. big logic functions) work better in FPGA logic than others (e.g. complicated wiring and bus architectures).