Re: [Qemu-devel] SMB for DOS ?

["André Braga" <meianoite@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 18 Dec 2004 12:48:16 -0800, John R. Hogerhuis <jhoger@pobox.com> wrote:
> This raises an interesting question in my mind, given the existence of
> "reconfigurable computing" where you have a PCI card containing an FPGA
> loaded onto your machine (such things do exist, and I expect in the
> future to start seeing these things standard on motherboards). Certainly
> an MMU can be created in FPGA code. There is an interesting article on
> reconfigurable computing in this month's Linux Journal, btw.

The PCI bus is still too slow to handle such tasks efficiently. Maybe
if the FPGA could be tied to the north bridge it would be actually
useful, or maybe the PCI Express bus is up to the task; anyway, the
current implementations wouldn't be that helpful at all.

The FPGA accelerators use to have many small "computing elements" and
some decent amount of local RAM. Going back and forth in the PCI bus
would kill most performance gains one would expect.


--
"The user-friendly computer is a red herring. The user-friendliness of
a book just makes it easier to turn pages. There's nothing
user-friendly about learning to read."
-- Alan Kay