From: Damien Morton (Morton@dennisinter.com)
Date: Fri Oct 06 2000 - 08:42:57 PDT
> From: John Regehr [mailto:regehr@cs.utah.edu]
>
> > It is my understanding that the limitations of this
> approach are scale and
> > trust. Scale: I don't think there has yet been an ASIC
> that could implement
> > a million line program, yet many of the applications we
> routinely use are of
> > this size.
>
> I would think that for the forseeable future compiling to
> hardware will
> be a semi-manual process where certain performance-critical, static
> algorithms are compiled to hardware and everything else is compiled to
> instructions. People who say otherwise* are full of it. It doesn't
> seem like a program such as Word or Linux could be sped up much by
> compiling to hardware, and I can't think of a good reason why somebody
> would take the time to try.
OTOH I think game coders would sell their immortal souls for such a
capability. Reconfigurable hardware coupled with higher-performance purpose
built hardware and an instruction driven GPU would be just the thing for
them.
> > Trust: Would you trust Microsoft to rewire your computer? What
> > about the consequences of a virus?
>
> This isn't an issue as long as reconfigurable processors have a
> non-reconfigurable core. If a bug can't wedge your hardware into a
> nonrecoverable state, why would you care if you run Microsoft's
> algorithms in hardware or software?
>
> * http://www.starbridgesystems.com/
>
> John
>
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