21 Feb
2012
21 Feb
'12
2:19 a.m.
On Mon, 20 Feb 2012, Peter C. Wallace wrote:
It all has to do with real time and latency. X86s (and
their assosciated
chipsets) have great throughput but dreadful latency (this is a common
tradeoff) especially for hardware replacement type tasks. The XMOS chips have
low latency (ns) and independent I/O available on multiple cores, the X86
cores share a (high latency/buffered) common data path
As I said before, the XMOS chips are designed for multiple coupled tasks with
(somewhat in FPGA space if the signal frequencies are not above perhaps a few
10 of MHz). It is designed to simulate hardware in software. The x86 cannot
do this very well, so as I said simply does not play in the same space at
all.
So, if I undestand you correctly, the point of the XCore/GA style
technology is to do in software what would be done in a more traditional
design with FPGA/PAL/ASIC based circuits? So the advantage of XCore/GA is
rapid prototyping and flexibility of implementation?
Alexey