If pugilists enter a prizefight with too much respect for one another the spectators are likely to watch an event that resembles fisticuffs less than it does "Dancing with the Stars". That, unfortunately is what happened yesterday during the ESC's "No holds barred panel debate entitled "Standalone vs. Embedded Processors" with Clive Maxfield championing FPGAs and Jim Turley taking up the case of the standalone processor.
Amid the good natured jabs at one another and some witty repartee the usual pedestran arguments were made by both sites. To wit:
The flexibilty of FPGAs when last minute design changes occur
The lower cost of hard processors when a project involves large volume production
The greater availability of development tools for processors
The faster time to market for FPGAs
You get the idea.
Unfortunately, only passing reference was made by Mr. Maxfield to a number of recent programmable logiic developments that, while not changing the equation, at least would make the discussion more interesting. Some for instances:
Altera is positioning its new Stratix V for applicatioins that now use a DSP chip, such as video processing and wireless base stations. The Stratix V FPGAs have a variable precision DSP block that can be set for 9 to 54 bit precision. There are plenty of DSP blocks--up to 3,680--resulting in a great deal of performance up to a total of 1,840 GMACs.
At ESC Actel displayed its SmartFusion mixed signal FPGAs for high complexity motor and motion control applications. With SmartFusion's integrated 32-bit ARM Cortex M3 MCU, programmable analog in-chip embedded nonvolatile memory and low power flash-based FPGA fabric, it addresses the challenges of motor control design.
Also at ESC Xilinx introduced an ARM Cortex processor-based platform that enables system architects and embedded software developers to apply a combination of serial and parallel processing with the horsepower required to drive tasks involving high-speed access to real-time inputs and complex digital signal processing neededd to meet their application-specific requirements.
It seems to me that the FPGA folks are making progress and in a year or tow they should make a real debate necessary.
What do you think?.
