Multicore Devices: A New Generation of Reconfigurable Architectures

For two decades, reconfigurable computing systems have provided an attractive alternative to fixed hardware solutions. Reconfigurable computing systems have demonstrated the low cost and flexibility of a software solution combined with the high performance of fixed hardware. For a variety of practical reasons, much of the work in this area focused on commercial FPGA devices as the underlying hardware platform. Recently, several new designs have diverged from the bit-level, circuit-oriented architectures of FPGAs and produced a variety of architectures more suitable for computation and high level language programming. These new highly parallel architectures contain a relatively large number of programmable cores, each approaching the complexity of a traditional microprocessor. Today such devices can be found in popular consumer electronics including game consoles and desktop PC graphics controllers as well as a new generation of supercomputers. These new devices, often described using ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ERSA
• Authors: Steven A. Guccione
• Keywords: ERSA 2008, Hardware, Level Language Programming, Reconfigurable Computing Systems, Reconfigurable Systems