Quote:
Originally Posted by matthey
Special purpose usually means a special price too. High end FPGAs are getting specialized hardware but they are expensive. IMO, creating an ASIC and selling cheap hardware makes more sense. A million dollars may sound expensive to individuals but designing and manufacturers boards like the Tabor probably costs hundreds of thousands already.
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Well it would be an ASIC so there are extra costs. But it wouldn't be a replacement for a standard FPGA, it could be made much smaller and more efficient for CPU implementations.
The advantage for doing something like that would be increasing the potential market. Making a new microcontroller platform is simply useless - there are all kinds of variants out there from low to high cost and making something similar would take many years and/or a lot of licences for building blocks (memory, I/O etc.).
In comparison the CPU-FPGA would be useful for software->hardware translations, processor experimenters, university courses in computing science and even (if the costs can be made low enough) for retrocomputing enthusiasts. I'd assume such a chip would have a hardware memory controller, general purpose I/O (low speed) and PCIe connections. If one need more I/O standard support it could be done in external FPGA chip(s).
And there are many ways one could improve performance for making a processor in such a chip.