Starbridge Hypercomputer & Viva

I heard quite a lot about the Viva development environment last week at the MAPLD 2005 conference in Washington DC. A lot of people had good things to say about it. It seemed to me like Starbridge are currently focussing on porting Viva to different hardware platforms. This leads to ask the question: are Starbridge no longer in the hardware business? What does this leave the Hypercomputer?

What are people's experience of using either Viva or the Hypercomputer?

Reply to
Robin Bruce
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Robin Bruce ( snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com) wrote: : I heard quite a lot about the Viva development environment last week at : the MAPLD 2005 conference in Washington DC. A lot of people had good : things to say about it. It seemed to me like Starbridge are currently : focussing on porting Viva to different hardware platforms. This leads : to ask the question: are Starbridge no longer in the hardware business? : What does this leave the Hypercomputer?

: What are people's experience of using either Viva or the Hypercomputer?

I did get the impression from some talks earlier in the year that Starbridge are more interested in pushing their software - lots of other people make hardware and the margins are less on hardware.

Mind you my opinion of Viva isn't so great - it's bascially just a schematic capture tool and some libraries, and as nice as they seem they're more pain than they're worth - esp. as like most SC tools Viva is *proprietry*.

o As complexity grows schematic tools become more like a weight around the neck o Proprietry. If they go under you can kiss your design work goodbye for future platforms / technologies. o You loose the power of things like the VHDL generate statement o Lots more

Also Starbridge keep grosly misusing the word 'Polymorphic' when describing Viva

- Polymorphism in an FPGA design is not a very good idea (!) and what they actually mean is that datatypes aren't fixed until compile time which is entirely different to polymorphism.

I was also suprised by certian people hailing Viva as revolutionary, when it isn't. What *does* put Viva ahead of VHDL is the ability to design a core (e.g. FFT) and chance the datatype of the data flow from 8 bit fixed point to 24 bit floating point to 32 bit floating point etc. in an instant. In this sense it is easier than VHDL, but personally I reckon an HDL and a decent editor are almost as simple in this respect.

Actually I think Starbridge also provide libraries to assist interfacing FPGAs running Viva generated code to host CPU systems - but they are far from alone in this respect.

Cheers, Chris

Reply to
c d saunter

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