The drawback with using FPGAs compared to commodity processors is that the FPGA market currently does not support using the bleeding edge processes that CPUs are manufactured with. Typically a competitively priced FPGA will be at least one generation behind a CPU. In HPC FPGA's are a plausible improvement, but at a smaller scale the development costs for incorporating a custom firmware for an FPGA into an application are significant. It all really rests on what demand is out there for a particular algorithm to be implemented as a firmware for an FPGA. FPGAs have limited floating point resources, for example the largest Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGA has about 2000 25 x 18 floating point units.
"By creating more than 1,000 mini-circuits within the FPGA chip, the researchers effectively turned the chip into a 1,000-core processor - each core working on it's own instructions." This is entirely feasible, but the 'cores' would have to be very very simple. Looking at the data sheet for the Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGA, it contains 118,560 Configurable Logic Blocks, which are equivalent to four Look Up Tables, and 8 flip-flops. If you wanted to create an 8-bit instruction set processor, it would require at minimum 16 CLBs just to decode the instructions, then you have to supply more logic blocks to do any actual arithmetic. So it is possible, but they are not talking about cores comparable to a PC.
Wrong. I want my government to stay out of other countries end of story. No military aid treaties, alliances or anything of the sort. We should trade with other countries, and that is where our relationship begins and ends.
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The drawback with using FPGAs compared to commodity processors is that the FPGA market currently does not support using the bleeding edge processes that CPUs are manufactured with. Typically a competitively priced FPGA will be at least one generation behind a CPU. In HPC FPGA's are a plausible improvement, but at a smaller scale the development costs for incorporating a custom firmware for an FPGA into an application are significant. It all really rests on what demand is out there for a particular algorithm to be implemented as a firmware for an FPGA. FPGAs have limited floating point resources, for example the largest Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGA has about 2000 25 x 18 floating point units.
"By creating more than 1,000 mini-circuits within the FPGA chip, the researchers effectively turned the chip into a 1,000-core processor - each core working on it's own instructions."
This is entirely feasible, but the 'cores' would have to be very very simple. Looking at the data sheet for the Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGA, it contains 118,560 Configurable Logic Blocks, which are equivalent to four Look Up Tables, and 8 flip-flops. If you wanted to create an 8-bit instruction set processor, it would require at minimum 16 CLBs just to decode the instructions, then you have to supply more logic blocks to do any actual arithmetic. So it is possible, but they are not talking about cores comparable to a PC.
http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/data_sheets/ds150.pdf
Wrong. I want my government to stay out of other countries end of story. No military aid treaties, alliances or anything of the sort. We should trade with other countries, and that is where our relationship begins and ends.
Please explain to me exactly what law WikiLeaks broke. And also how it would fall under any U.S. jurisdiction.
I haven't tried it out, but I've had my eye on this project for a while. http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/