Universal CPU that could threaten Intel, AMD, and Nvidia

techradar.com

13 points·emayljames··3 comments

Itanic is back. News at 11. If FPGAs were so good as processors, everybody would run them. FPGA are used to demo processors but then they end up in silicon because of integration, cost and power consumption.

> If FPGAs were so good as processors, everybody would run them. FPGA are used to demo processors but then they end up in silicon because of integration, cost and power consumption.

You're right, but that's precisely what they are doing. They offer a processor emulation platform (on FPGA) for customers who would like to develop their application before the chip release. It doesn't seem to me that they are claiming the FPGA-based platform runs at 4GHz and beats all CPUs and GPUs, they are claiming that the chip they will be releasing soon will.

That said, it's a CPU based on a VLIW architecture (like Itanium). And this architecture is not known to be efficient for general purpose applications.

One place where FPGAs could be interesting is in retro game console emulation with the ultimate goal would be to achieve perfect accuracy at the hardware level.

https://www.racketboy.com/retro/mister-fpga-the-future-of-re...

You would create a Verilog/VDHL program that exactly replicate the game console at the hardware level to emulate the console.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com