* Posts by Roscoe

1 publicly visible post • joined 28 Feb 2011

Dinky Florida machine 'could whup world No 1 computer's ass'

Roscoe
Alien

No Bragging

The CHREC kids aren't bragging: Reconfigurable processors really *are* wildly better than Von Neuman architectures at some classes of computation. Floating point isn't one of those, but integer arithmetic (and every algorithm that can be based on it) sure is.

As an earlier commenter pointed out, the pain lay in the "reconfigurable" part - mapping the algorithm to the device. Many have tried to develop tools that take in an algorithm expressed in a high-level language (usu. C) and spit out config files for the target device, but none have really succeeded. It still takes some human cleverness to puzzle out a good FPGA implementation.

An Alien for a surprisingly still-alien technology, despite having been around forever.