April 26, 2004
We write the microcode, so you don’t have to
Well, that’s cool.
A company called Stretch (a name that is full of history in computing) has announced a chip that combines a plain ol’ RISC processor with a large programmable logic array. This, by itself, isn’t that wild. What’s interesting is that they claim that their proprietary C/C++ compiler will detect patterns in code that will benefit from having custom instructions produced . . . and will create them on the fly in the programmable logic array.
Although I’m not sure that it will find much use in personal computers or servers, at least right away (can you imagine having to swap out an entire PLA each time you change processes?), it sounds very cool for embedded applications.
posted 21:07