"makes me realize that the design doesn't even fully utilize the almost EOLd Spartan-6 (a low end one, even in its heyday)"
Yeah, it's impressively efficient. Adds more evidence to our argument that SPARC implementations can be technologically competitive in efficiency with ARM, etc.
"AFAIUI this would smell like Soft Machines VISC, only better, because FREE!"
It could happen. Achronix's FPGA's are badass, too, hitting up to 1.5GHz. Their dev boards are actually cheaper than Oracle's SPARC servers, too, with added benefit of putting custom logic for accelerators in there w/ SPARC I.P.. I haven't studied much of VISC, though, so I have little comment there.
I'll comment on those other links later tonight as I'm off to do some more paying work. :)
Yeah, it's impressively efficient. Adds more evidence to our argument that SPARC implementations can be technologically competitive in efficiency with ARM, etc.
"AFAIUI this would smell like Soft Machines VISC, only better, because FREE!"
It could happen. Achronix's FPGA's are badass, too, hitting up to 1.5GHz. Their dev boards are actually cheaper than Oracle's SPARC servers, too, with added benefit of putting custom logic for accelerators in there w/ SPARC I.P.. I haven't studied much of VISC, though, so I have little comment there.
I'll comment on those other links later tonight as I'm off to do some more paying work. :)