[Fpga-synth] Try out spartan3e projects, questions

[Theo Verelst]

On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 19:24 -0700, Eric Brombaugh wrote:
> ...The big advantage of FPGAs is parallelism - even on a low-end part you 
> can clock all those registers, multipliers and RAMS simultaneously. Even 
> high-end DSPs with multiple execution units (normally no more than 8 or 
> so) have bus bottlenecks that will prevent you from keeping those 
> resources busy all the time.
> 
> The big advantage of DSPs is flexibility - it takes only fractions of a 
> second to reconfigure a DSP for a completely different task (ie, load a 
> program), or to compile & debug code. The FPGA configuration process is 
> slower and the compile times can take hours.
> 
> There's a lot of overlap though and you can use both technologies to 
> accomplish many of the same things. If your only tool is a hammer...
> 
> Eric
> 

Well, it's all a matter of how much wonderfull speedy and potent
technology "Silicon Valley" wil give us, ain't it. I'd like to see 
in discussions like this what is fun and interesting to do with it, 
the secret high spun R&D labs from the past probably have another 
function, so I like to try out interesting signal processing blocks 
and like Scott's great synth design people can than have fun with that, 
or learn, and play or what have we.

For the MI5-likes amoung us: it's interesting to note that the DSPs or
ASICs programmed as DSPs can achieve yet higher processing rates because
of course the FPGA's will have an iterconnect structure and the
generality of that will probably always bog down the processing
throughput.

And of course a potent DSP could even compile it's own C code or so, 
and that in seconds or less, but than again using partitions, FPGA
restructuring doesn't need to take hours.

Cheers,

  Theo