News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Intel Buys Altera for $16.7B. Parent comment

Re:Intel Buys Altera for $16.7B by PaulHoule on Monday June 01, 2015 @12:06PM (#9639723)
A big advantage that FPGAs have is that they are fast at "single threaded" tasks so they can parse data in formats that aren't easy to parse quickly, like the XML-based FIX protocol.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Intel Buys Altera for $16.7B by mattgodbolt on Monday June 01, 2015 @06:42PM (#9642723)
FIX is usually sent and received as ASCII tags of the form NUM=value\x01 , not as XML.

Source: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Information_eXchang...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Intel Buys Altera for $16.7B by uxcn on Monday June 01, 2015 @12:59PM (#9640204)
I'm not sure FPGAs are 'suited' for parsing formats with lots of variable lengths and data dependencies like XML, but obviously they can be faster than typical Von Neumann. I know binary market data streams were one of the first uses in the financial industry.
[ Parent | on HN ]