FRANKENCHIP - This will change how computing is done

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The chip company announced on Wednesday at GigaOm Structure in San Francisco that it is preparing to sell a Xeon E5-FPGA hybrid chip to some of its largest customers.

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Essentially a FPGA is a reconfigurable gate array that can be configured with software - a "blank computer" if you like (though it can do much more than compute). Adding this to a CPU will enable programmers to literally create custom hardware on the CPU.



This is going to change the face of computing. The distinction between electrical engineering and software engineering may be largely irrelevant in the future.

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Intel is taking field programmable gate arrays seriously as a means of accelerating applications and has crafted a hybrid chip that marries an FPGA to a Xeon E5 processor and puts them in the same processor socket.

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I would seriously recommend any software engineers who engineer software in which performance is crucial to immediately start learning Verilog. Your job may depend on it.


The potential for accelerating games is huge. Also scientific applications. One group was able to get a 75 X performance boost for a fluid dynamics code by writing custom circuits to compute the fluid fluxes.