Nowadays, all the rave, hype, and excitement usually surrounds the latest and greatest 6 core cpus such as Intel's Core i7 – 980X performance based processor which, as of this writing, is currently the highest ranked amongst processors in the consumer market. However, despite the extraordinary capabilities of the finest muti-core processors of today, technology with the potential to outpace them several times over may already be present. Intel has already uncovered a concept cpu with an impressive 48 cores about year ago, but even that may seem under powered in comparison to the whopping 1,000 core field programmable gate array processor (FPGA) which was developed by a research team from the University of Massachusetts lead by Dr Wim Vanderbauwhede of Glasgow University in Scotland.
The processor can purportedly obliterate current high-end cpu performance by a factor of 20 all the while using less power! The researchers believed that the technology might be adopted quickly and become common in specialized computers in as little as two years; however, this specific type of processor may not be suitable for standard desktops just yet. “FPGAs are not used within standard computers because they are fairly difficult to program but their processing power is huge while their energy consumption is very small because they are so much quicker – so they are also a greener option,” Dr Vanderbauwhede stated.
FPGA is a circuit design which consists of hardware logic cells configured via software often by end-consumers after manufacturing. The parallel architecture of the processors specialize in tasks such as encoding, decoding, and code breaking.
Dr. Vanderbauwhede explained that the focus of the research was to find more efficient methods of programming FPGAs in order to harness their usability towards applications which they may run more efficiently due to their greater processing per clock cycle capability
The processor can purportedly obliterate current high-end cpu performance by a factor of 20 all the while using less power! The researchers believed that the technology might be adopted quickly and become common in specialized computers in as little as two years; however, this specific type of processor may not be suitable for standard desktops just yet. “FPGAs are not used within standard computers because they are fairly difficult to program but their processing power is huge while their energy consumption is very small because they are so much quicker – so they are also a greener option,” Dr Vanderbauwhede stated.
FPGA is a circuit design which consists of hardware logic cells configured via software often by end-consumers after manufacturing. The parallel architecture of the processors specialize in tasks such as encoding, decoding, and code breaking.
Dr. Vanderbauwhede explained that the focus of the research was to find more efficient methods of programming FPGAs in order to harness their usability towards applications which they may run more efficiently due to their greater processing per clock cycle capability
RSS Feed
