Now in 2015 and with the launch of the Tegra X1, we can finally begin putting the picture together. Erista as it turns out is something of a rapid release product for NVIDIA; what had been plans to produce a 16nm FF part in 2015 became plans to produce a 20nm part, with Erista to be that part. To pull together Erista NVIDIA would go for a quick time-to-market approach in SoC design, pairing up a Maxwell GPU with ARM Cortex A57 & A53 GPUs, to be produced on TSMC’s 20nm SoC process.
Now if someone can just pair this SoC with a decent sized FPGA module as seen here: http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=96
…You not only get a powerful platform for running FPGA recreations of legacy platforms like the MiniMig Amiga, you get an awesome way to experiment with other arbitrary hardware designs. I’d love to try making a digital audio/music powerhouse station with that.
I totally agree, and I strongly believe if NVIDIA does this, many companies will, too (especially audio companies like Chord’s HUGO with its custom FPGA)!
It’s good to see that there is still a little diversity among the various ARM designs, because competition keeps progress moving faster.
ARM seems to be at a pretty good stage in its development – the important pieces are standardized, but there is still room for some differentiation / experimentation. Once everything becomes too uniform, markets stagnate.
(I still worry about the ARM architecture itself becoming too dominant, like Intel on the desktop and server, but that’s another thing.)