On 29 April 2015 at 16:58, Nick <suckless-dev_AT_njw.me.uk> wrote:
> Quoth Julius Schmidt:
>> I am currently collecting funds for a production run of a Zynq based
>> board built specifically with Plan 9 in mind. It has a dual-core ARM
>> CPU and a Xilinx FPGA. We are running 9front, but labs and 9atom
>> would likely work fine too.
>
> why do you need a
> FPGA to offload the Plan 9 drawing operations? Why couldn't you just
> use a regular GPU?
My guess (but aiju might correct it) would be that yes you could use a
standard GPU. But that would need a lot of glue code (to translate the
Plan9 drawing primitives into GPU primitives) with some conversions
(e.g., if your GPU expects big-endians).
Having the FPGA-as-GPU means you do the translation of the Plan9
drawing code into FPGA logic once. And then the CPU can make calls
that look just like function calls (almost). Also, it's not completely
impossible to compile C code to FPGA so you can automate this
translation at least partially.
Cheers,
--
______________
Raphaël Proust
Received on Thu Apr 30 2015 - 08:13:39 CEST