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Let me get this straight: It's basically a microcontroller timed 144? Can anyone explain to a nonhardware geek?

by kiba 15y ago

chalst 15y ago
This example gives something of an idea: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/pub/AP002-OSC.html http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/pub/AP002-OSC.... The picture I get is that the boundary between computing components and control/sensor electronics is dissolved.
zackmorris 15y ago
I've done many write-ups on this if you look under my profile. Basically the idea is that most of the big problems in software engineering can't be solved easily in a serial fashion with current methodologies, and many of the existing parallel solutions are either too expensive or two complicated to advance the state of the art. I wish I had this chip 15 years ago...
femto 15y ago
It's the future, representing a convergence between Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and the microprocessor. Gate arrays are vast arrays of logic gates, which can be wired together in almost arbitrary patterns by a sea of "fuses", typically controlled by state stored in on-board SRAM. They are real time and blindingly fast due to their massive parallelism, achieving supercomputer type speeds when applied to the right type of problem and programmed well. They are more difficult to program than a microprocessor. One way of looking at an FPGA is as an array of tens of millions of very simple computing engines. Over the years, the number of transistors on an FPGA has been rocketing up. Generally these transistors have been put to use by providing more and more simple logic blocks. We are now to the point where we have almost more gates than we know what to do with, and the chip is being dominated by interconnects. This has seen a move towards including a limited number of elaborate hard wired blocks, such as CPUs and multipliers, in addition to the array of logic. The logical evolution is to stop providing more blocks, but make each block more complex as transistor counts go up. Eventually we will see arrays of tens of millions of microprocessors, rather than tens of millions of logic blocks. There will be no distinction between a multicore CPU and FPGA. It's worth noting that the first Xilinx FPGAs, thirty years ago, provided arrays of around 144 logic blocks, similar to the processor count in this chip. Extrapolate 30 years and we will have an array of 10 million microprocessors.
- femto 15y ago
  Correction: I've been lax in my terminology with logic gates and cells. Current big FPGAs contain around 2 million "logic cells", which typically represent between 1 and 10 logic gates each, depending on device programming.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Unfortunately for the FPGA guys, it seems like in general the closer they get to CPUs the less compelling their product becomes.
  - femto 15y ago
    I hesitate to divide the world into "FPGA guys" and "non-FPGA guys". It's a continuum of computing power; CPU<->DSP<->FPGA, and one moves up and down it as the task varies and technology changes. If anything defines an "FPGA guy" is choice of language. Historically FPGAs have been programmed with an HDL, such as VHDL or Verilog, because these languages are concurrent meaning they handle parallel systems. My prediction is that as mainstream multicore CPUs develop we will see the rise of concurrent versions of mainstream languages, which will supplant HDLs. Just as DSP's are now programmed in (almost) vanilla C/C++/..., we will see FPGAs being programmed using the same languages as micros and DSPs. It will then be possible to write code and (almost) seamlessly run it on any platform, depending on how fast it needs to run.
    - sliverstorm 15y ago
      By "FPGA guys" I meant the guys who make FPGAs, not the guys who use them. There is still a pretty strong dividing line between FPGAs and DSP chips.
      - femto 15y ago
        Sorry for the misinterpretation. If I was an FPGA manufacturer, I'd be trying to buy a company like Green Array and beat the CPU manufacturers to the middle ground. Agree about the current divide, though I think it will weaken and eventually disappear.

Let me get this straight: It's basically a microcontroller timed 144? Can anyone explain to a nonhardware geek?

by kiba 15y ago

Let me get this straight: It's basically a microcontroller timed 144? Can anyone explain to a nonhardware geek?

This example gives something of an idea: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/pub/AP002-OSC.html http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/pub/AP002-OSC.... The picture I get is that the boundary between computing components and control/sensor electronics is dissolved.

zackmorris 15y ago

I've done many write-ups on this if you look under my profile. Basically the idea is that most of the big problems in software engineering can't be solved easily in a serial fashion with current methodologies, and many of the existing parallel solutions are either too expensive or two complicated to advance the state of the art. I wish I had this chip 15 years ago...

femto 15y ago

It's the future, representing a convergence between Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and the microprocessor. Gate arrays are vast arrays of logic gates, which can be wired together in almost arbitrary patterns by a sea of "fuses", typically controlled by state stored in on-board SRAM. They are real time and blindingly fast due to their massive parallelism, achieving supercomputer type speeds when applied to the right type of problem and programmed well. They are more difficult to program than a microprocessor. One way of looking at an FPGA is as an array of tens of millions of very simple computing engines. Over the years, the number of transistors on an FPGA has been rocketing up. Generally these transistors have been put to use by providing more and more simple logic blocks. We are now to the point where we have almost more gates than we know what to do with, and the chip is being dominated by interconnects. This has seen a move towards including a limited number of elaborate hard wired blocks, such as CPUs and multipliers, in addition to the array of logic. The logical evolution is to stop providing more blocks, but make each block more complex as transistor counts go up. Eventually we will see arrays of tens of millions of microprocessors, rather than tens of millions of logic blocks. There will be no distinction between a multicore CPU and FPGA. It's worth noting that the first Xilinx FPGAs, thirty years ago, provided arrays of around 144 logic blocks, similar to the processor count in this chip. Extrapolate 30 years and we will have an array of 10 million microprocessors.

femto 15y ago
Correction: I've been lax in my terminology with logic gates and cells. Current big FPGAs contain around 2 million "logic cells", which typically represent between 1 and 10 logic gates each, depending on device programming.
sliverstorm 15y ago
Unfortunately for the FPGA guys, it seems like in general the closer they get to CPUs the less compelling their product becomes.
- femto 15y ago
  I hesitate to divide the world into "FPGA guys" and "non-FPGA guys". It's a continuum of computing power; CPU<->DSP<->FPGA, and one moves up and down it as the task varies and technology changes. If anything defines an "FPGA guy" is choice of language. Historically FPGAs have been programmed with an HDL, such as VHDL or Verilog, because these languages are concurrent meaning they handle parallel systems. My prediction is that as mainstream multicore CPUs develop we will see the rise of concurrent versions of mainstream languages, which will supplant HDLs. Just as DSP's are now programmed in (almost) vanilla C/C++/..., we will see FPGAs being programmed using the same languages as micros and DSPs. It will then be possible to write code and (almost) seamlessly run it on any platform, depending on how fast it needs to run.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    By "FPGA guys" I meant the guys who make FPGAs, not the guys who use them. There is still a pretty strong dividing line between FPGAs and DSP chips.
    - femto 15y ago
      Sorry for the misinterpretation. If I was an FPGA manufacturer, I'd be trying to buy a company like Green Array and beat the CPU manufacturers to the middle ground. Agree about the current divide, though I think it will weaken and eventually disappear.