: > One of the posibilities that interest me is a V4 module sitting in a 940 : > socket with some MGTs wired up (space is tight - I realise that!) - if : > you happen to be dealing in high speed data aquisition and processing on : > the bit/word and (large) frame level then a tightly coupled : > FPGA/commodity CPU system is really quite exciting. : >
: Takes one back to when you could interface 68000s or whatever to your : custom logic or even wire wrap your own mobo, its been along time since : one could "touch" a processor.
I hate to say it, but that's before my time other than tinkering with the CPU bus sticking out the back of an old Amstrad CPC... There are various things now bringing high end commodity CPUs (as opposed to specialist DSP hardware) and FPGAs close together - offerings from Cray, SGI, this new opteron socketed thingie etc. Most of the fuss is around their use in reconfigurable computing so the offerings tend to be lacking for raw serial IO...
: Whats you acquisition area?
Starlight - astronomical adaptive optics. Potentially you can be talking about multiple CCDs of many thosands of pixels framing at over 1KHz...
cds