Workload-specific FPGAs are here, now. They're not
'promising' because they're doing exactly what they
were made to do!
Right. I was thinking in terms of them being more integrated into hardware and software toolchains. We already have software runtimes (various Javascript VMs, .NET, the JVM and its offshoots, etc) that can optimize code at runtime based on the hardware that's present, hotspots in the code, etc.
Now imagine if FPGAs were integrated into your typical laptop/desktop logic board. Now imagine those software runtimes we talked about above could optimize your hardware at runtime as well. Or maybe it wouldn't be transparent; maybe FPGA hardware would be targetable like GPU hardware is today. Anyway, there's a lot of things that could happen there...
They already have a name for that and you already
named it. It's called cache ;)
I should have said "embedded DRAM" instead of "embedded RAM."
eDRAM is different from your typical CPU cache. Your CPU cache is almost always SRAM. But SRAM takes up 3x as much die space as an equivalent amount of eDRAM. Of course... some processors like IBM's POWER chips use eDRAM as L3 cache so the lines are blurred a little.
A lot of game consoles use embedded DRAM for stuff like graphics processing. On the XBox One I believe it's used as a framebuffer.
>We already have software runtimes (various Javascript VMs, .NET, the JVM and its offshoots, etc) that can optimize code at runtime based on the hardware that's present, hotspots in the code, etc.
Are you a hardware guy? :)
Thanks for elaborating. I had no idea how you went from "memory latency is a problem, that's why we have L_n caches" to "memory latency is a problem, we'll probably solve it ... (with cache)." This helps.
The biggest problem I see with integrating FPGAs into designs (HW) is educational. An on-die accessory FPGA doesn't amount to much if it doesn't get used. It's coming though. One way or another we're going to see more flexible HW. Taking advantage of it won't be something we're used to.
Now imagine if FPGAs were integrated into your typical laptop/desktop logic board. Now imagine those software runtimes we talked about above could optimize your hardware at runtime as well. Or maybe it wouldn't be transparent; maybe FPGA hardware would be targetable like GPU hardware is today. Anyway, there's a lot of things that could happen there...
I should have said "embedded DRAM" instead of "embedded RAM."eDRAM is different from your typical CPU cache. Your CPU cache is almost always SRAM. But SRAM takes up 3x as much die space as an equivalent amount of eDRAM. Of course... some processors like IBM's POWER chips use eDRAM as L3 cache so the lines are blurred a little.
A lot of game consoles use embedded DRAM for stuff like graphics processing. On the XBox One I believe it's used as a framebuffer.