Stretch Announces Chip That Rewires Itself On The Fly 311
tigre writes "CNET News reports on a chip startup call Stretch which produces the S5000, a RISC processor with electronically programmable hardware so that it can add to its instruction set as it deems necessary. Thus it can re-configure itself to behave like a DSP, or a (digital) ASIC, and perform the equivalent of hundreds of instructions in one cycle. Great way to bridge the gap between general-purpose computing and ASICs."
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
That reminds me of... (Score:5, Interesting)
not quite accurate summary (Score:3, Interesting)
This would compare with FPGA's I believe in that most FPGA applications are fixed once loaded, although I know that there was talk about stargate systems on slashdot (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/15/1629
using FPGA's for general processing before.
Re:virus hitting the hardware (Score:5, Interesting)
Forgive my ignorance, but why would this be any different than the virus you can write with the general purpose CPUs we have today? You could make the machine unreliable, but that wouldn't make for an effective virus distributing machine.
FPGA (Score:2, Interesting)
Hardware manufacturers that need special hardware operations (IE MPEG-2 decoding) use dedicated, custom hardware for large volume production. Dynamically configurable hardware is expensive for large scales production, and small scale production will likely use FPGA for similar effect. I may be sceptical, but I doubt it'll catch on.
How will this affect cross-platform development? (Score:4, Interesting)
This sounds vaguely like the dream solution for developers. The article says:
Does that mean it can handly booting multiple OSes simutaniously? If so, how long before someone writes an app that bridges multiple OSes, allowing the equivalent of emulation, without the emulation? I don't know about the rest of you, but the potential of this chip sounds like a dream come true. And at $35-$100 per chip... it's cheaper than the processor for most systems anyway.
Re:New application-speed records to be set... (Score:4, Interesting)
Gaming? (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine the optimizations that you could do for the next release of the Doom engine. They could own the market for GPUs that optimizes itself for specific games. Could be amazing.
Woooo (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Insightful?! (Score:5, Interesting)
I highly doubt anyone is planning on making PCs with these. They are designed for being a processor in something like a data logging / control system, surveillance video compression, etc. Your system will probably have no need for virus detection any more specific than other more general regression and test suites it will need during operation.
One piece missing for genetic processing... (Score:3, Interesting)
oh yeah, we have those... PEOPLE! Now, can I get those neural processor connects and graft this thing to my head already?
Re:That reminds me of... (Score:5, Interesting)
The interesting result was that the circuit designed by the GA didn't use conventional structures, but instead, according to traditional circuit design theory, should not have functioned at all -- dead loops, etc. The behavior and result was tied to the physical FPGA being used to test and give feedback to the GA -- the minute nuances, as you referred to them -- and was not portable to even another instance of the exact same FPGA.
Perfect for emulation (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well... (Score:2, Interesting)
in other words, i can not only embed codec details in my datastream to you, but at the beginning of it all, i can give you a 'cpu package' that you can use to run my custom codec, perhaps just once...
what interests me about the S5000 is, what of the S5500, &etc? do they have plans to segragate cores from each other in other ways - say by way of a 'certficate broker' chip, also on-board?
because if so, this could be a real boon for future media control, as long as the other reasons for this chips success actually are also fruitious, and results in a real market deployment.
being able to change not just instructions, but what those instructions mean, dynamically over a protected core, would give software a new protection mechanism, is what i'm trying to get at
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That reminds me of... (Score:5, Interesting)
Crazy stuff.
Re:Insightful?! (Score:2, Interesting)
In fact, there may be advantages to dumbing down the CPU somewhat. Remove some of the SIMD instructions in favor of applications and libraries implementing more specialized routines in the subprocessor.
Been there, done that (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, that was only a little over 20 years ago.
FYI: Since somebody is going to ask... The original Z80000 design was killed when Zilog stalled out as a general purpose processor maker and moved into embedded processors after the bugs in the initial run of Z8001 chips and IBM's selection of the Intel 8088.
Re:This is a setback for crypto-land... (Score:3, Interesting)
As computers speed up, both encryption and decryption get faster. However, while adding another 128 bits to 128-bit symmetric cipher may be "free" with newer computers (and eventually will be), the 2^128 multiplicitave increase to the space the decrypters have to search is not free. To increase encryption power, the encryptors merely double their work. (To an approximation; I don't think the work load is strictly linear but it's a lot closer to that then exponential, and that's all that matters.) Meanwhile, for that relatively modest investment in encryption power, the decrypter's jobs got 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,4
This is why, in the relatively near future, we'll all have encryption that is effectively "unbreakable", because no conceivable decrypter could be built that could do the calculations to crack the encryptions, even with the raw materials of the entire Universe.
Practically speaking, most of us already have damn-near unbreakable encryption today; if you're connecting to a computer with SSH, SSH is most likely the strongest link in your security chain by far; the weak links are the computers on each end of the link, the humans on each end of the link, and possibly the facilities the computers are in. Nobody is going to tap your ssh stream and get any value from the massive decryption effort that would be necessary unless you're trading secrets worth billions.
Specialized hardware can only gain you a linear speed up, at best, and those calculations for "minimal computer" to crack a given encryption key are not extrapolated from modern computers, they are extrapolated from the maximum computation possible to do, given a finite energy supply. (QM-based computation advocates may wait until they have a large-scale (multi-thousand-qubit) machine to jump in here.)
Altera's Nios Processor (Score:3, Interesting)
Altera produce an FPGA with one or more built in ARM processors. This sounds very similar to the Scratch system, but the ARM processors are limited in connection into the fabric of the FPGA by the not particularly fast bus used with the processor. Scratch appear to have made the data transfer rate between the two parts of utmost importance, which is essential in high throughput applications like this.
Altera have also developed a softcore processor, that is one implemented entirely on an FPGA. It is highly configurable - instructions can be added, cache and memory behavior altered, buses adapted, etc. Coupled with things such as the DSP blocks (trees of multiply accumulates), a 50Mhz processor can process data in a specific task at the same rate as a general purpose processor running at 10 times the speed.
The work I'm doing is investigating the use of many of these processors on one fpga. Levels of optimisation that cannot be done with conventional multiprocessor systems will be possible. Changing the memory system to deal with specific algoriths, or bus widths between certain processors will allow much better performance.
Scratch also seems to be making a difference by claiming to have easy to use and working development tools, which is one thing that Altera cannot really claim to have done.