Jason McBrien wrote:
The recent discussion on interesting system
architectures triggered a
memory
I have of a documentary on TV somewhere (Discovery? TechTV? PBS?) on
evolvable hardware. There was some intrigue in the episode, on investors
accusing researchers of bad faith, or lying, or a scam. Hardware was built,
I'm pretty sure it was the CAM-Brain, and it was used quite a bit before
the
company that built it went under (It may have been Genobyte along with ATR,
but I remember the company being based out of England)
Anyways, this definitely counts as "interesting" hardware. An FPGA based
computer that optimizes it's own logic based on a given problem. The
CAM-Brain was built, as was an FPGA engine built by HP, and another in
Japan
somewhere. Here are some links if anyone is interested:
I had an idea like this once. It involved an FPGA executing bytecodes
in microcode, and loading gate configurations from ROM for often-used
bytecodes as it ran.
Peace... Sridhar