Re:Intel Buys Altera for $16.7B
by derefr on Monday June 01, 2015 @03:05PM
(#9641298)
> in-the-fly reconfiguration for specific computations
I always wondered, given that Intel's processors already have a pretty large gap between their instruction set and their real microcode, whether it would make sense to have a nominal "CPU" that, when fed an instruction stream, executes it normally on general-purpose cores, but also runs a tracing+profiling JIT over it to eventually generate a VHDL gate-equivalent program to jam into an on-core FPGA. "Hardware JIT", basically, with no explicit programming step needed.
Re:Intel Buys Altera for $16.7B
by amelius on Monday June 01, 2015 @04:27PM
(#9641896)
Programming a CPU is becoming more and more a problem of fitting as much in the data caches as possible. Bandwidth is the problem, not the speed of the execution units. I don't see the huge benefit of an FPGA here.
I always wondered, given that Intel's processors already have a pretty large gap between their instruction set and their real microcode, whether it would make sense to have a nominal "CPU" that, when fed an instruction stream, executes it normally on general-purpose cores, but also runs a tracing+profiling JIT over it to eventually generate a VHDL gate-equivalent program to jam into an on-core FPGA. "Hardware JIT", basically, with no explicit programming step needed.