From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Apr 26 17:24:45 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from chmod.ath.cx (CC2-861.charter-stl.com [24.217.115.99]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E768C37B422 for ; Thu, 26 Apr 2001 17:24:42 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ajh3@chmod.ath.cx) Received: by chmod.ath.cx (Postfix, from userid 1001) id 31E9BA8DD; Thu, 26 Apr 2001 19:23:52 -0500 (CDT) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 19:23:52 -0500 From: Andrew Hesford To: "Michael C . Wu" , Remy Nonnenmacher , ajh3@chmod.ath.cx, jgowdy@home.com, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: x86-64 Hammer and IA64 Itainium Message-ID: <20010426192352.A2341@cec.wustl.edu> References: <20010417205711.C64757@cec.wustl.edu> <200104181422.f3IELwC11439@luxren2.boostworks.com> <20010426180836.C88522@peorth.iteration.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20010426180836.C88522@peorth.iteration.net>; from keichii@iteration.net on Thu, Apr 26, 2001 at 06:08:36PM -0500 X-Loop: Andrew Hesford Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, Apr 26, 2001 at 06:08:36PM -0500, Michael C . Wu wrote: > | and a bunch of ARMs for low-level I/O tasks. Back to imagination. (Take > | a look at 0.15um copper process FPGAs with embeded ARM at Altera, for > | example, and you will see why no one, in the futur, will never ever need > | a proprietary and undocumented 'server class' SCSI or network card). Do you mean to say that, in the future, we will all blow our own FPGAs at home? That to get the next processor upgrade, you download the schematics and use Xilinx Foundation Series to build a chip? FPGAs are not the answer... they can never be as fast as custom-fab chips. It may be, in the future, we get circuits to run fast enough that we wouldn't notice given today's speeds, but remember, if FPGAs get that fast, custom-fab chips will be even faster. The future isn't FPGAs; it's GaAs BJT circuitry, designed and built by the guys who have money to set up a fab and roll out millions of chips. It will be a long, long time before anything changes about how we get our chips; the only thing that will change is how they are made. > Please make Altera/Xilinx make their FPGA programming software > freely available. Ugh. I think we need a better solution than the Xilinx software. It's absolutely horrible. They should stick to electronics and leave the software design to those who know what they're doing. -- Andrew Hesford ajh3@chmod.ath.cx To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message