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Never heart of it? Well it's pretty exciting. There are two types of processors: All-purpose CPUs like from AMD or Intel, which can pretty much do anything - it just depends on the software. In contrary to that, there are specalized processors, intended for one single purpose, like a sound chip on your sound card for example. A "raw chip" combines both: There's one layer of transistors which run the software. Instead of hard-wired connections between these transistors (like today) there's a second layer of transistors, and these transistors can form any desired wiring between the first layer of transistors. In other words, the chip is not hard-wired, it's dynamic wired.

A compiler would not translate a C++ program (as an example) into machine code, it would translate a C++ program into an optimized wiring-scheme for the chip. If you start an application, say Firefox, then you would effectively have a "Firefox chip" in your computer, which is hardware-optimized to run Firefox. If you start a second application, then some free space on the chip can be used to run this second application and so forth. Well I hope you know what I mean (sorry English is not my native language).

The chip would dynamically and constantly transfer itself to be optimized for just any running application. A chip that is designed on the hardware level to run a certain application, can run this application faster than an all-purpose chip who can run anything, but has to do everything in software. I've read about this in "Spektrum der Wissenschaft", the German ister-publication of "Scientific American". They said that even though the "compiler" they used to create this dynamic wiring was totally un-optimized, this new chip ran all tests faster than a comparable (MHz-like) standard CPU.

Tom

It seems you have discovered FPGAs and Reconfigurable Computing. You most definitely can not compile Firefox into a chip, nor any old C++. You can compile or synthesize some specialized C languages which are really crippled C with some cripled HDL into FPGA. Most engineers would use a HDL like Verilog (C'ish) or VHDL (Ada'ish) but there is some interest from software types who avoid learning real electronics and try to make a lazy pass with C like HDLs, I am not a big fan of those.

Raw chip doesn't mean anything really, it might mean unpackaged dies but nobody uses that term.

The Scientific American article to which you refer is vastly overstating the case for RC & FPGAs, it is much more even when you try to do math on a couple of fast P4s v the same $ worth of FPGA hardware. Thats because general purpose cpus can run about 10-20x faster and have agreat floating point capacity. FPGAs today have zero FP capacity other than using up a lot of FPGA resources to get a poor mans FPU. On the other hand FPGAs can be very good at mostly logical operations that don't map onto cpu such as crypto, pattern matching, and almost anything DSP and integer, esp if the word sizes are odd.

See Xilinx, Altera, Lattice, Atmel for vendor sites.

Hope that helps.

Okay in the context of your 1st post if you have a couple of $M you can indeed buy some Cray super computers (Octiga Bay originally) that basically combine some Opterons with you guessed it some Xilinx FPGAs, and also note that both are fully syncronous clocked systems. FPGAs will never be async and wouldn't work well with the clockles ARM in the main article. Infact the ARM hasn't made much of a dent in FPGAs, Altera used to and barely still includes an older ARM core in one of their FPGA families, Xilinx uses the PPC core but only at about 300MHz with no FPU.