Intel-Altera, again

If you count it that way, then the king is probably the undead 8051...

Best regards, Piotr

I guess we need to toss microcontrollers out the window...

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Rick

Their resources closely match the size of the problems they deal with...

Best regards, Piotr

Not because of ARMs and especially not MIPS. Small MCUs dominate unit sales. I believe there were about 15 billions MCUs sold in 2012. PCs sold 350 million and 200 million tablets. 700 million smart phones tops the list in quantity. Given the average selling price and the limited profit margin in the lower priced ARMs, I can see why Intel is still dominant in the market.

--

Rick

The majority is 8 bitters or even 4-bitters -- if you count all that watches, playing postcards, toys, etc.

Not only do they "still" run Xeons, the relative part of them effectively leaves no room for their competition and is still increasing. Even the CEOs eventually learn that an x64 server provides the same level of performance for at least an order of magnitude less money and the availability should be provided by the software layer, not the hardware platform itself. Best regards, Piotr

We tried it, and I don't understand the results.

The uZed is powered from +5V. If we pull the SD card, Linux doesn't run and the 7020 FPGA doesn't configure. The +5 pulls about 0.82 amps, for the whole uZed board. Plug in the SD and boot, it goes up about

100 mA. So the dynamic power consumption is about half a watt. That doesn't sound like it would heat the FPGA much.

The boot loader will do something at powerup without the SD card, but it's hard to believe that would use much power.

ThetaJA of the 7020 is rated 19K/w, so half a watt makes about 10 degs C, not enough to cause pain.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   laser drivers and controllers 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

I saw a logic simulator system at a trade show. You can buy as many plugin boards as you want. Each board has 16 high-end FPGAs, which cost about $6K per chip. Yikes.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   laser drivers and controllers 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Yuk. Do people still use 8051s? For like, car door window controllers or toasters or something?

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   laser drivers and controllers 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

However, unless your hardware manufacturer knows what you're going to do with the FPGA, there is no real way to design the cooling, other than massive (possibly expensive) overkill.

Even with a "reasonable number of registers", high performance processors (even some not so high) still do scoreboarding and renaming.

To be fair, farmers milk cows as long as they're profitable, too.

There were very good non-technical reasons for this bit of history.

Require recursion? No, perhaps not but it's a quite useful technique. Think about a program that searches a directory tree.

And PIC and even the 8051.

I've never seen a 100A supply on an ARM.

Actually, I'd like to have my heart rate logged. I probably take it

20 times a day. EKG too, but after wearing a 5-wire monitor (with too short leads) 24hrs/day for the last week, not that much (missing patches of skin on my chest).

Not sure why a blender needs WiFi, but Jimmy Buffet might GPS on his salt shaker.

There isn't a tumperature diode on the chip?

The power supply is not much bigger than a regular PC supply. But there are other considerations other than just CPU power usage. Six SAS hard drives (20W to 30W each) draws more than the CPU itself.

I know, it doesn't make sense. 80W would literally burn the chip out and be untouchable. They are probably counting power usage from other area. The chip itself feels more like 30W to 40W.

If one wants an optimally designed system, then yes, the hardware must be designe in close cooperation. But if the accelerator cards will follow the route of the "graphics" cards, they may be standardized somehow. Here is my favourite el cheapo GPGPU platform:

Its closed-loop liquid cooling subystem is big, possibly an overkill, but works extremely well (never seen more than ~45C) and the entire beast costs about 1000 USD. IMHO it would easily cool 2 Virtexes/Stratixes too.

Best regards, Piotr

afaict there a lots of usb stuff like thumbdrives and such that has a

8051 to do the housekeeping

-Lasse

I would have expected those (cy7c68013A EZ-USB and cy7c68053_MoBL-USB) to be dirt cheap, but they're actually rather expensive, $6 and 11, qty 1k!

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 Thanks, 
    - Win