re: FRANKENCHIP - This will change how computing is done

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Also, without reading the article, are we talking about extending the ISA to include instructions for accessing this FPGA? Curious as to the technical implementation details.

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I dunno. That's a good question. I would think they would have to.


I've been doing some more reading and the FPGA companies themselves have been making FPGA+CPUs for a while now.



It may turn out you don't need the CPU at all. There are already several open source CPUs that you can download and install to an FPGA. Think about the implications - rather than buying a particular CPU, you'd just buy an FPGA - and the software required to program a CPU into the chip - and upgrades to the CPU could be done via software!

Whatever FPGA gates you had leftever could be used for specialized hardware or for additional cores - or for a GPU. The same FPGA could be tailored to gamers, science & engineering, data base management - etc.


I think it would be interesting to see how many OISC's could be crammed into one FPGA.