Comments on: Disruptive Technologies

By: Vincent Hindriksen

Vincent Hindriksen — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 08:50:39 +0000

Your article talks about disruptive strategies when entering a new market, while my article is from the perspective of the current stakeholders in such market. But nice article, it shows the stability-vs-progression-balance from another perspective.

By: Adrian

Adrian — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 04:59:20 +0000

Are you sure you have the right definition of disruptive?
See:
http://adrianboeing.blogspot.com/2011/01/disruptive-innovations.html

I see no reason why experts can predict disruptive innovations.
It seems to me that all of the things you have spoken about are simply evolutions of a product, rather than disruption.

By: Vincent Hindriksen

Vincent Hindriksen — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 22:28:47 +0000

I think I completely disagree. FPGAs have never proven themselves to become a mainstream technology while being quite old and trusted by many. They are currently good for prototyping and specialised products (i.e. in the financial market). You know shader-languages had the same problem (a hardware-language and not a software-language) and GPGPU changed that enough to get it lifted; you need GPFPGA. You noticed I subtly described OpenCL as a potential disruptive technology for VHDL and Verilog in the article? What do you think? The rest of the reasons you give (price, power) also count for current CPUs and GPUs; FPGAs might win in performance, but the coming years not in FLOPS/€ compared to off the shelf silicon. There is also a limit to effective cache-size (what you call separated memory here), which does not change the game in favour if FPGAs. I don't get your last remark; any architecture that is in that meta-FPGA can be in conventional CPUs too. I do watch development in the sector closely. Don't misunderstand; I think FPGAs rock, but not for mass-market (yet).

By: rabit

rabit — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 14:49:00 +0000

I do think FPGAs could very well become the “next big thing” for quite a few reasons. HDL languages like VHDL & Verilog are not hard to program, just very different from software. You just have to be aware you’re not programming for a single processing element chugging through lists of compiled operations one by one, but thousands of interconnected simple ones each running parts of your code simultaneously. Simple as that Well not really, but Xilinx and Altera provide free dev tools that make it very easy to get started.

FPGAs a very complimentary of CPU and GPU tech. I’ve long believed that the coolest thing ever would be an FPGA sitting between a CPU and a GPU as a sort of macro pipeline processor, allow game devs to reduce unnecessary traffic by offloading that to an FPGA.

FPGAs are getting cheaper and more powerful. They still have a long way to approach ASIC in terms of density but that isn’t important. There are countless operations that even a simple >250k gate FPGA could do for general computing. Filesystem data encryption/compression comes to mind.

FPGAs are really the very first step into the other tech you described here. The key I think is getting away from the conventional idea that memory and processing have to be separate entities. People always talk about the future of 1024-core computing but don’t understand the huge constraints of conventional architecture, bus contention, etc. I think the future is in devices containing billions of simple logic elements and FPGAs are just the Model T of this new generation.