Got to thinking about FPGAs and their under-utilisation in the consumer and high-end PC market...
So what do you think? Is it a crazy idea? Or is it a damn good one that I shouldn't have posted before making a patent application, lol... (I'm so lazy).
Usually most of my good ideas like this already exist or are beginning development.... anybody heard of such a thing?
Basically, what I'm proposing is an FPGA based computer with an OS designed around it such that it can redesign the cpu structures for the most efficient execution of the current tasks at hand. (not to mention that emulation of just about any hardware and OS should be a snap... the power and speed of FPGAs today are there...) I've never really used them though... perhaps they cannot be re-programmed in an automated fashion quickly enough...
Thought i would pipe in here - did an advanced computer architecture course last semester - my lecturer's research area was actually FPGAs! Lots of money in it.
You've gotten a few concepts in their which merit examination but I think maybe not together,
Rewriting the instruction set on the fly... that would be problomatic i think. The control unit of the processor itself would have to redesigned to understand the different instruction set architecture. That would then tie this in with your second (I'm presumming they were intended to be seperate) redesigning CPU structures:
This can be done and indeed has been done. This is called the FPGA soft-core approach where a number of control logic blocks effectively emmulate a processor core. When you need a different processor core you reconfigure the FPGA to suit your needs. You could even have multiple soft cores on the same FPGA if the board has enough CLBs.
Here is a very good resource on this:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/design_resources/proc_central/index.htmThe microblaze resource is probably the most relevent. Although this conceptually offers the flexibility you would be desiring... the processing power of a soft-core is limited compared to the CPU in your average home PC:
The MicroBlaze™ 32-bit soft processor core is the industry's fastest soft processing solution. Running at 150 MHz, the MicroBlaze processor delivers up to 120 DMIPs in the Virtex-II Pro for building complex systems for the networking, telecommunication, data communication, embedded and consumer markets. The MicroBlaze processor features a RISC architecture with Harvard-style separate 32-bit instruction and data busses running at full speed to execute programs and access data from both on-chip and external memory. A standard set of peripherals are also CoreConnect™ enabled to offer MicroBlaze designers compatibility and reuse
I'm not belittling this though. Current FPGA research areas include hetrogenous systems where you would have an ASIC, an x86 (like a pentium) and an FPGA all integrated so that the best platfrom is picked for the current task. My lecturers area of research was in the field of assisting a CPU with some specialised tasks (like matrix-vector artimetic, image processing etc) much in the same way that a flointing point unit was used in the old pentiums - with huge increases in performance for those particular tasks,
Topic: An OS that re-writes the instruction set of the cpu on the fly? (Read 2069 times)