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>One might ask, why are cpus not being replaced by FPGAs? they do sometimes !, for very specific applications. The problem is that an FPGA is programmed for on
by quadrature 3y ago
>One might ask, why are cpus not being replaced by FPGAs?
they do sometimes !, for very specific applications. The problem is that an FPGA is programmed for one specific task and would have to be taken offline and reprogrammed if you wanted to do something else with it. Its not general purpose like a CPU where you can load up any program and have it run.
Programming an FPGA is also comparatively much harder to reason about than a CPU because of the parallelism and timing you described.
- MSFT_Edging 3y agoSome of the more modern Xilinx stuff has features where you don't need to take down the whole FPGA to reload a bitstream onto part of the chip. Its really neat, you can do live reprogramming of one component and leave the others alone or have an A/B setup where one updates while the other is unchanged.
- JohnFen 3y agoYes, I'm working on a Xilinx ARM processor with an FPGA. The FPGA and the CPU are independent units in the chip that can each operate with or without the other. We can indeed reprogram the FPGA without taking the system down.
- davemp 3y agoIt goes even further. You can partially reconfigure the FPGA fabric itself: https://support.xilinx.com/s/article/34924?language=en_US https://support.xilinx.com/s/article/34924?language=en_US
- MSFT_Edging 3y agoThat's what I was referring to. Neat stuff.
- quadrature 3y agoThat is really cool, hadn't heard of that before.