Re: current "done" projects on OpenCores

There's a company, DRC, that sells a high-performance FPGA board that
plugs into cpu sockets on multi-cpu motherboards:

http://www.drccomputer.com/pages/products.html
"DRC's flagship product is the DRC RPU that plugs directly into an open
 processor socket in a multi-way Opteron system. This provides direct access
 to DDR memory and any adjacent Opteron processor at full HyperTransport
 bandwidth [12.8 GBps] and ±75 nanosecond latency. The RPU then becomes
 a resource for the remaining Opteron processor for implementing application
 subroutines in hardware."

There's also an article from The Register that has quotes and photos:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/21/drc_fpga_module/print.html

I expect FPGAs to grow in popularity for general computing.  Perhaps
some day every computer will have a CPU, RAM, FPGA, and IO.  Will
programmers study circuit design or will they write code in high level
languages that can be compiled to the FPGA?  I guess that it would be
much easier to compile Haskell code to a circuit than C code.  What
would a language look like that is specifically designed for
compilation to circuits?   It would surely have buffers and bit
streams as elements in the language.  This is so interesting. :)

-Michael

[email protected]
http://tamale.net/

Kragen Javier Sitaker wrote:
<snip>
> One implication of all this free-software hardware-design stuff is
> that the relative advantage of including some FPGA space in a
> general-purpose computer is gradually increasing.  If you could
> transform your FPU into a fast integer FFT unit for one application,
> and then a crypto core for another, and then JPEG compression for a
> third, you might be better off than just having an FPU --- even at the
> cost of making the FPU larger and slower.
<snip>