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Ian,
Why wait - do it yourself, we just
did!
In order to provide an option customers asked for
we implemented a small processor and then dropped 16 of them onto an FPGA -
actually on the side of an FPGA already pretty full with our main product.
Peak performance of each processor is ~750MOPS so the total is about the same as
claimed by a top-of-the-line Pentium (but at far lower power - the whole box
with its display and fast interfaces consumes ~25W). Admittedly the application
is naturally fairly parallel and interaction between processors is limited
(the processors work in pairs).
Anyone wanting to do some research should not find
it too difficult to implement interesting multi-core on reasonably priced
FPGA's.
Barry.
Dr Barry M. Cook, BSc, PhD, CEng, MBCS, CITP, MIEEE
CTO,
4Links
Limited,
Bletchley Park,
MK3 6ZP,
UK.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2007 5:14
PM
Subject: Re: More multi-core
Looks like I better dust off the old Parallel Programming text
what I rote back in the last century!
At Brookes/Computing we now teach no concurrent programming at all.
If it resumes, it'll probably be monitors using Java – which only 1 in 20 or
so will master to any useful degree. But I'll still be expected to
return 70% pass-rate, of course.
It will start to get interesting once the hardware, on a general-purpose
machine, passes 8 or so cores. Any guesses as to performance-scaling
achieved in practice? Could be lucrative this time around.
Ian
On 4 Jul 2007, at 09:35, Barry Cook wrote:
News of another manufacturer entering the multi-core arena - with yet
another architecture.
Interestingly, the power
consumption argument is getting more prominent [Two cores consume less power
than one core at twice the speed]. We heard it at WoTUG in Eindhoven (from
Philips) and it is spreading.
Barry.
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