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> FPGAs have been the next big thing for at least 15 years

It's a tough equation. They are certainly not aimed at or geared towards a commodity co-processor slot next to the CPU in a consumer PC.

What I am arguing or proposing is that if Intel acquired Xilinx and got Microsoft and Apple behind the idea of integrating an FPGA as a standard co-processor for the i-whatever chip we could see vast performance improvements for certain applications.

Per my example, I can take a $100 FPGA today and process 1.5 billion 32 bit pixels per second through an FIR pipeline. That same hardware is instantly reprogrammable to implement a myriad of other functions in hardware, not software. The possibilities are endless.

Many years ago I was involved in writing some code for DNA sequencing. We wrote the software to gain an understanding of what had to happen. Once we knew what to do, the design was converted to hardware. The performance boost was unbelievable. If I remember correctly, we were running the same data sets 1,000 times faster or more.

GPU's are great, but I've seen cases where a graphically intensive application makes use of the GPU and precludes anything else from using it. Not having done any GPU coding myself I can't really compare the two approaches (FPGA vs. GPU). The only thing I think I can say is that a GPU is denser and possibly faster because it is fixed logic rather than programmable (it doesn't have to support all the structures and layers that an FPGA has).

What I'd love to see is an FPGA grafted onto a multicore Intel chip with a pre-defined separate co-processor expansion channel via multiple MGT channels (Multi-Gigabit Transceivers). This would allow co-processor expansion beyond the resources provided on-chip. If the entire thing is encased within a published-and-supported standard we could open the doors to an amazing leap in computing for a wide range of advanced applications.

Let's see, Intel market cap is around $120 billion and Xilinx is somewhere around 8 billion. Yeah, let's do it.




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