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I believe the next big jump in FPGA utilization will involve high-level synthesis. Verilog and VHDL are essentially analogous to assembly languages in terms of

I believe the next big jump in FPGA utilization will involve high-level synthesis. Verilog and VHDL are essentially analogous to assembly languages in terms of abstraction.

swah 13y ago
That will happen at the same time PS3 games are written in Haskell instead of C++ :)
anon859486896 13y ago
I think that is true, but I think there is another problem as well. There is no, to my knowledge, equivalent of GCC for an FPGA, and by that I mean a free, open source, cross platform synthesizer. You are stuck using their tools, and they are generally suboptimal at best when it comes to the IDEs at least. I think one of the main problems is that it is the FPGA manufacturers that also provide the toolchains, and that is your only option. Edit: Also, forgot to add. I am not sure FPGAs are that ameniable to using higher level languages simply because you can make a trivial adjustment to your code and resource usuage will jump from 1% to 27%, which is not trivial. It used to be the same with your normal CPUs, every cycle counted, this will improve with time of course.
kryten 13y ago
I was using Xilinx FPGAs in 1998 and they were saying next year then for such a thing. It's 15 years later and it's still the same with shitty overpriced tools, per-vendor ghettos and crazy per-unit prices. Granted we've got a couple of ARM cores instead of a single PPC 603 and a clock speed ramp but that's it. If they snap out of that crap, perhaps, one day we'll reach utopia. Then again, fucking rich engineering companies over for wads of cash is better for business.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  I don't know that it's by choice. The market is small, and the problems are not easy. Software compilers have had tons of effort, money, and mathematical knowledge thrown at them for the past several decades. HDL-to-FPGA synthesis and place/route on the other hand has been driven by only a few companies, and hasn't been around nearly as long.
- alecdibble 13y ago
  It's definitely a chicken-and-egg problem. All I meant by my comment is that I can't see FPGAs taking off if people are stuck connecting together IP or using Verilog/VHDL. It's just too low level.

I believe the next big jump in FPGA utilization will involve high-level synthesis. Verilog and VHDL are essentially analogous to assembly languages in terms of abstraction.

swah 13y ago

That will happen at the same time PS3 games are written in Haskell instead of C++ :)

anon859486896 13y ago

I think that is true, but I think there is another problem as well. There is no, to my knowledge, equivalent of GCC for an FPGA, and by that I mean a free, open source, cross platform synthesizer. You are stuck using their tools, and they are generally suboptimal at best when it comes to the IDEs at least. I think one of the main problems is that it is the FPGA manufacturers that also provide the toolchains, and that is your only option. Edit: Also, forgot to add. I am not sure FPGAs are that ameniable to using higher level languages simply because you can make a trivial adjustment to your code and resource usuage will jump from 1% to 27%, which is not trivial. It used to be the same with your normal CPUs, every cycle counted, this will improve with time of course.

kryten 13y ago

I was using Xilinx FPGAs in 1998 and they were saying next year then for such a thing. It's 15 years later and it's still the same with shitty overpriced tools, per-vendor ghettos and crazy per-unit prices. Granted we've got a couple of ARM cores instead of a single PPC 603 and a clock speed ramp but that's it. If they snap out of that crap, perhaps, one day we'll reach utopia. Then again, fucking rich engineering companies over for wads of cash is better for business.

sliverstorm 13y ago
I don't know that it's by choice. The market is small, and the problems are not easy. Software compilers have had tons of effort, money, and mathematical knowledge thrown at them for the past several decades. HDL-to-FPGA synthesis and place/route on the other hand has been driven by only a few companies, and hasn't been around nearly as long.
alecdibble 13y ago
It's definitely a chicken-and-egg problem. All I meant by my comment is that I can't see FPGAs taking off if people are stuck connecting together IP or using Verilog/VHDL. It's just too low level.