[Open-graphics] Interesting... more FPGAs in CPU sockets.

[Tim Schmidt]

On 4/18/07, Patrick McNamara <wpmcnamara at yahoo.com> wrote:
> http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=38964

Indeed.  It appears that, at least temporarily, manufacturing
processes have outpaced engineer's ability to effectively use said
manufacturing capacity.  The absolutely massive multi-megabyte caches
on recent CPUs hint at the same problem.  There's long-term hope in
cores like Sun's UltraSparc T1, Via's C7, etc...  but ultimately, the
software _and_ underlying CPU architecture are going to have to handle
massive parallelism (one easy way to use lots of transistors) in a
reasonably transparent way, or use more transistors being fpga-like,
or a combination of the two.  Of course, as always, more and more
devices will fall into the silicon black hole that is the CPU as well.
 Undoubtedly we'll eventually see high-performance machines that are
capable of functioning with just the CPU, with a few high-speed
interfaces for additional hardware or co-processors.

Wake me up when system RAM succumbs to the inevitable.

--tim