6 May
2007
6 May
'07
1:32 a.m.
On 5 May 2007 at 19:02, Richard wrote:
Au contraire. "Architecture" these days is
whatever you want it to be
cooked into an FPGA. Maybe you don't consider that architecture, but
the hardware possibilities available to you for low cost these days
are limited only by your imagination and gate count. Of course
there's a trade-off between speed and versatility but FPGA designs are
*very* popular for custom architectures these days.
I was speaking of production computer architectures, not one-off or
special-purpose designs. Something for which you'd likely find a
book to learn assembly language.
Sure you can program an FPGA anyway you want, within limits. But
they're not sold as computer systems. And even so, most are binary
2's complement wordsize-a-multiple-of-8-bits designs.
Arguing that you can program an FPGA to look like anything you'd like
seems to me to be akin to saying that one can microprogram a 360/30
to have any old instruction set imaginable or program an emulator to
run on a DG Nova to emulate any instruction set that one cared for.
Cheers,
Chuck