That might be true, but it's not the whole story. Juan Garza, Agere NPU business-development manager, said that he expects to win sockets in new designs that look like an IP access switch for some applications and a voice soft switch for others. That got me thinking along those old familiar themes of retargetable architectures that use open, programmable communication controllers with open, modular software stacks to serve multiple purposes in the network.

Of course, reconfigurability leads inevitably to an eyes-glazed-over skepticism that is probably somewhat deserved. Next week, I'll be participating in a panel on reconfigurability in communication applications, held in Santa Clara, Calif., by Forward Concepts and Pact XPP Technologies. The primary goal will be to show that, even though reconfigurable computing has been talked about in hushed tones since the mid-1980s, there might be some enabling technology that makes it believable today.

If you're a geezer like me, you'll remember FPGA concepts like Lattice's in-system programmability, or the Parthenon suite of configuration tools. More recently, we've had distributed-supercomputing concepts from the likes of Star Bridge Systems. And of course, Forward Concepts' Will Strauss has been on the front line of those pointing out the promises and perils of software-defined radio (SDR).

The world is not ready for hardware that is retargetable from an end-user perspective. In fact, network elements that can be reprogrammed by a carrier or network manager can be realized in practice, but are a little scary for most service providers or enterprise IT managers to consider.

Yet the desire to cut manufacturing costs in a recession means OEM inventory managers can take advantage of line-card reprogrammability today. If the combination of open network processors and open protocol stacks lets an access card look like a voice gateway with one tweak and an ATM access multiplexer with another, then system-level designers really are ready for reconfigurable computing. After a couple of years' experience ordering line cards du jour, perhaps end users will be ready for everything-modems and multiband, multimode SDR handsets.