Somewhat OT: FPGA Develpment Kits

On Nov 21, 2006, at 6:46 PM, Vincent Slyngstad wrote: I strongly disagree with this statement in two ways. My first point of disagreement is this. Doing it in the FPGA, the FPGA's gates and internal signal routing are configured to form the arrangement of circuitry to implement a processor...in REAL HARDWARE. What if someone is unfortunate enough to still be running Windows...So they're running an emulator under Windows, and Windows blows up. Then the emulated system ceases to exist. The performance of the emulated system depends on the other stuff being run on the host system, so if you'rew orking on software, that makes benchmarking or certain types of performance optimization impossible...execution is nondeterministic.

Now, if you implement a processor in an FPGA, write an operating system for that processor (possibly even a multitasking one), then write an emulator to run under that...NOW they're equivalent. My second point of disagreement is your statement that doing it in an FPGA is "much slower". Why should this necessarily be the case? You may not be able to clock the FPGA at multiple GHz, but you also don't have the overheard of another operating system and the emulator itself, which is considerable.