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A comment on The Boundary Between Hardware And Software.

Re:The Boundary Between Hardware And Software by sebastianconcpt on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @03:14PM (#9179924)
The best way I found to think about this is best summarised by Alan Kay: "Hardware is crystallised software".

I think is the best metaphor because you can think of the crystal as immutable software.

FPGA's are like melting crystals.

They can eventually mutate under some circumstances until they crystallise again (crystals/temperature vs. FPGA reprogramming)

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Re:The Boundary Between Hardware And Software by gshrikant on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @04:04PM (#9180246)
I find it more natural to think of software as different internal states of hardware or driving the state changes, at least.

For FPGAs, the "software" defines the hardware (in a sense) so there is a very tight integration between the two - to the extent that there really isn't any.

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