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Variable Instruction Computing: What Is Old Is New Again (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Higher performance, lower power. One of the challenges with hitting both of those benchmarks is the need to adhere to established instruction sets like x86. One interesting development is the use of Variable Instruction Sets at the silicon level. The basic concept of translating established instructions to something more efficient for the specific architecture isn't new; this is what yielded the first low-power x86 processors at the beginning of the century. But those relied on the translation at the software level. A company called Soft Machine is paving the way for variable instructions in hardware. Think of it as an emulator for ARM, x86, and other architectures that is running on silicon for fast execution while sipping very little power.
The problem with your analysis is that the words "flexible" and "fixed" don't have technical meaning here. Those aren't differing physical characteristics to choose between, those are just human-level descriptions of how the programming will be organized.
An FPGA intentionally has a whole bunch of extra circuits supporting each logical unit, those are expected to take a lot of extra power because it is additional functionality. An FPGA doesn't use more power per physical transistor, it just has a whole bunch of transistors and other logic devices for each programmable unit. When you then implement the circuit as an ASIC, it uses less power because it uses less logic devices, not because there is some other qualitative difference.
Something like this, any extra logic devices would be specifically designed to manage the other logic devices for low power use. That is a very reasonable thing to try to do. If their implementation is successful and useful in the market is a whole different issue, of course.
Transmeta was successful from an engineering perspective; their products used less power than their competitors. Problem was, they were only a few months ahead, and required too many changes in devices. All other companies had to do was be richer, and more able to secure access to new fab technologies.
One big difference here is that this will potentially change thread management for programmers in a way that many people will like. It might very well be able to fragment the industry and corner a significant chunk of interest.
This sounds like Transmeta. Remember that, Slashdot old-timers? The company had trouble, and was eventually bought by private equity. I'm too lazy to find out if this is a re-emergence by the rights holders, or if they're going to get sued by the guys who bought Transmeta's IP. IIRC, It was an Israeli company that took it off the US exchange. After that I lost track of it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?