Industrial Control Designline Blog
Viewpoint: Why programmability is now a game changer
Jacques Benkoski
9/10/2009 11:25 AM EDT
The increased in design cost, the growth in the number of IPs and the mask costs are combining to seemingly make any but the highest volume chips economically unfeasible.
The pundits are seeing a world with microprocessors and a few consumer SoCs as the remaining dinosaurs while all the other designs are heading towards a cul-de-sac with a small passage towards the FPGA world for the low volume price- and power-insensitive applications.
The trends are thus obvious and the outcome inevitable. Game Over.
Not so. The designers of that game have forgotten a few important parameters. The pressure to reach low-power solutions is now pervasive beyond the mobile applications.
The cost of the executing a given task in software on a generic processor architecture versus dedicated hardware has been proven to be two orders of magnitude off in cost, power and performance.
With all due respect to the embedded cores, they would have to run at impossible speed to swallow a 5 GPS stream, perform live video transcoding or aim a beam shaping antenna array.
Some would want to argue that multi-core is the solution, especially with dedicated cores for specific applications.
But the multi-core programming problem remains stubbornly elusive beyond the simple threading on an identical architecture. Nobody seems to be able to master the unbound complexity of heterogeneous processing engines with different characteristics communicating over ill-characterized busses and networks-on-chips.
At the same time, the number of software engineers continues to grow and the number of hardware engineers continues to shrink — at least on a relative basis — yet in most cases the software is given away by semiconductor companies as a necessary component of a platform but hardly as the valuable differentiator it is made to be.
While these disputes are happening, the FPGA world has been undergoing its own silent revolution. No longer simply seen as gobs of glue logic, the FPGAs have now emerged as an interesting alternative implementation for many applications with power, price and performance that enable them to make their way into consumer and even mobile applications.
Yet at the same time, they also emerge as a fascinating distributed compute fabric with a regular architecture of computational elements and memories. They suddenly represent a quasi-systolic array alternative to the Von Neumann digital processors with a much more attractive performance, cost and power tradeoff.
That is if one finds a way to program the beast and not try to do the equivalent of assembly coding, i.e. RTL-level design.
Next: Converging trends
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Mapou
9/10/2009 3:24 PM EDT
Great article. The processor industry is heading straight toward disaster. Worse, they are taking their customers with them. Intel, AMD, IBM and the others are applying tremendous pressure on the software industry to adopt multithreading as the de facto parallel programming model even though they know full well that multithreading is not part of the future of computing. Billions will be wasted on converting applications for the current crop of multicore processors. Multithreading is an abomination and the powers that be know it. They also know the solution (I've been saying it for years) but they have way too much invested in last century's paradigms to change strategy at this late stage of the game. Too bad. Sooner or later, a maverick startup will pop out of nowhere with the real solution that will blow everyone else out of the water. And then there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Intel, especially has a lot to lose. They should tread carefully because being a behemoth is no guarantee of invincibility in this business.
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Google or Bing "How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis" if you want to find out more.
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Bassman63
10/1/2009 5:45 PM EDT
I agree that FPGAs are going to take up most of the designs but one point people seem to miss is that they compare an SoC with a chip. ThatÂ’s an apples to oranges comparison. You need to compare the SoC with the end system. How much would the end system cost without the SoC. That brings a lot more designs into the SoC camp.
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