On Saturday 01 March 2003 02:00, Hunsberger, Peter wrote: > You need some low level hooks, but that's what video cards do all the time: > move transformations from the CPU to the video card. I'd guess this is > where Niclas was heading...???
I'm not looking for a Net Appliance, although the pointer is appreciated. Well, there is an OpenCores project (open source hardware project), which are suffering from too many electronic designers, and too few software guys. They wish they had more "tool power", not to rely on commercial tools, but the development is slow. The software people are focused on things that make themselves more productive. Since I've started doing some, rather simple, VHDL designs lately (basically to learn), I thought that perhaps a bit of helping each other would build an across-border inter-community. My VHDL takes a simple 1Mbps byte stream, containing 3 pairs of 16bit data (voltage and current in three phase AC) and computes the power, phase and load factor, and lines it up in RAM for the CPU to have simple 32bit access. My problem was two-fold; The CPU I have is not good in receiving synchronous data, and secondly most CPU power would be spent on the phase computations. Then I realized that XML parsing and character conversions would be fairly straight forward as well. > Makes it more interesting, but it's still like a video card: have it > hardware render what it can, do the rest yourself. Yes, I was thinking along this "graphics card" analogy, and because FPGAs are "soft" so the hardware can be re-programmed later with more features, provided that there are enough available CLBs (Complex Logic Blocks). It is just a very loose thought, prior to any looks at architecture, implementation, test benches and manufacturing issues. Niclas P.S. Still didn't get an answer... ;o)
