Morosoph's Journal: More on Slot-in FPGAs

My last JE has been submitted as an article.

If you're wondering, my interest in the story is that I've done a small amount of chip design myself, for a small startup, Advanced Rendering Technology, which made boxes that perform ray-tracing in hardware. The modern incarnation of ART is to be found here. For a short synopsis of the company and its history, here is a comment by my old boss.

I'll probably be fit enough to work next year, so I'm hoping to get hold of one of these things... :o)

Note: Original JE deleted as I posted a reply that read a little like sour grapes, due to this article, currently in The Mysterious Future. I hadn't mentioned the word "Opteron". Duh!

FPGA that slots into CPU slot to become available

[Morosoph]

For those that wish to try some serious hardware hacking, The Register reports [theregister.co.uk] that a startup DRC [drccomputer.com], will be bringing a "Dynamically Reconfigurable Coprocessor" (FPGA [wikipedia.org]) as a unit to slot into your motherboard at an expected cost of $4,500 this year, and $3,000 in 2007.

Are there any inner loops that people seriously want to optimise? Anyone here up to coding a back-end to GCC?

Chipdesign

[Philip K Dickhead]

You did chi Design. You wrote a synopsis. Insert bad joke here.

I am working at a very large Verilog compiler company right now...

Ouch!

[Morosoph]

You will be punished in heck!

You're right, though. Perhaps I should bone up on assembler while I'm on the case :o)

Hope you don't mind if I was coding VHDL?!