On 10/15/06, Nick S-A <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> We're trying to convert
> functions to hardware, and exposing some of the underlying semantics
> is an okay thing to do.
> To learn a new language, the performance gain would have to be very
> serious.
>
> I'm skipping the GPU entirely and proposing that we convert to FPGA
> logic.
Given these three constraints, I agree that a Limited C->Verilog
converter is probably the best option.
I didn't realize that we were just using FPGA Logic, but I guess that
makes sense because it is more efficient, and more configurable, than
going through a GPU. However, I still think we should focus more on
getting the GPU working, and this has the nice side-effect of letting
us use BrookGPU. Once we get the GPU working, the OHF should have
enough followers to support any number of languages that people feel
like implementing.
Well, the Open Graphics GPU isn't programmable in the way that the
latest high-end graphics chips are. Our design goals are to get the
maximum result from a minimum of logic, and that requires us to
implement only the OpenGL fixed-function fragment pipeline.
This is another reason I'm skipping the GPU for high-performance computing.
That doesn't stop us from developing a programmable shader later, but
my perspective on using GPUs for HPC is that there's a better way, and
I'd rather work on THAT.
As a side note, isn't this all that SystemC is? I have never even
looked at SystemC, but given the name it seems like this is the goal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SystemC
Looks like an HDL-ish set of libraries for C++. With the right
restrictions, I imagine you could make it synthesizable. It appears
to be more powerful than a regular HDL. And I'm guessing that it's
probably harder to synthesize. There are probably aspects of this
that we would want to imitate.
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