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 -----
From: Ian East
To: Barry Cook
Cc: Occam Family
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.
http://www.embeddedtechjournal.com/articles_2007/20070626_freescale.htm
Barry.