Today’s high-performance, multi-core processing systems are complicated beasts – from both a hardware and a software perspective.  Developing the architectures, protocols, interconnects, and software development tools and methodologies that can take advantage of multiple 64-bit processors working in collaboration can’t be done on a chalkboard.  It’s an exercise that requires extensive prototyping, trial-and-error, and experimentation. 

Unfortunately, “experimenting” with implementations in monolithic silicon is impractical for any of us that don’t moonlight managing hedge funds.  When there is a seven-figure price tag and a few months of turnaround time for each “ … Read More → "Sun Shines on Xilinx"

We’ve all had a fun time complaining.

It’s not like Marketing (upper-case “M”) was without blame, either.

When the new millennium dawned, we’d had enough of “System Gates” – the metric that FPGA companies used to describe and inflate the capacity of their devices.  In those days, vendors gave us a huge number – something like the number of transistors divided by three or four, as the “system gate” count of their devices.  Most of the transistors on an FPGA, however, are involved in configuration logic, routing, and other structures that don’ … Read More → "Apples to Apples"

8:59 AM – Buzzword Bob calmly climbs aboard his ergonomically efficient office throne.  His was special-ordered – not the standard-issue sort of desk chair found in all the other engineers’ cubicles.  He flicks on his flat-screen monitor (wouldn’t dream of leaving it on sucking power all night) and types his 10-character password to log on.  Bob was the first in the department to have a flat-screen. Since he was sure he was sensitive to something about the CRTs, he had early-adopted the LCD screen when it first hit the market (at a premium price, of course).  When … Read More → "Buzzword Bob"