An Evolution of General Purpose Processing: Reconfigurable Logic Computing

The historical improvements in the performance of general purpose processors have long provided opportunities for application innovation. Word processing, spreadsheets, desktop publishing, networking and various game genres are just some of the many applications that have arisen because of the increasing capabilities and the versatility of general purpose processors. Key to these innovations is the fact that general purpose processors do not predefine the applications that they are going to run. Currently, the capabilities of individual general purpose processors are encountering challenges, such as power limits, and are not scaling as rapidly as they once were. As a consequence, a variety of approaches are being employed to address this situation, including multiprocessors, vector extensions and special purpose accelerators. While each of these techniques extends a processor's compute capabilities each sacrifices generality in one way or another.