A Hardware-Software Symbiosis

Roland Piquepaille writes "We all want smaller and faster computers. Of course, this increases the complexity of the work of computer designers. But now, computer scientists from the University of Virginia are coming with a radical new idea which may revolutionize computer design. They've developed Tortola, a virtual interface that enables hardware and software to communicate and to solve problems together. This approach can be applied to get a better performance from a specific system. It also can be used in the areas of security or power consumption. And it soon could be commercialized with the help of IBM and Intel."

Comments

BS again....

[gweihir]

Sorry, but Hardware and software do not solve problems together. That is straight from the "computers are magic"-fraction. Hardware solves problems under software control. Hardware alone can do nothing and software alone cannot run.

Using inferface layers to get more portable and easier to use interfaces is an old and well-established technique.

There people are looking for money, right? Why does /. provide free advertizing to them?

CCS

[diablovision]

This article is an example of CCS: "Cute Chick Science". The article has about as much fluff as a popcorn kernel. I am not exactly sure to what they are referring here--FPGAs? There seem to be a number of statements that are overly categorical and seemingly not well informed such as "This middle layer would allow software to adapt to the hardware it's running on, something engineers have not been able to do in the past," and "to engineer software that can communicate between the two layers, [hardware and software]".

If there wasn't a pic of a cute professor involved, would anyone care?