Final exam

Question 3: Reconfigurable processors

Suppose that you are a venture capitalist, and are offered the opportunity to fund a group of engineers proposing to develop a new hardware chip design called a "reconfigurable processor". By that, we mean a processor whose instruction set the user can reconfigure to better match the requirements of a domain-specific task; that is, achieve a higher performance at a given manufacturing cost for that task compared to a generic microprocessor. (Examples of such domain-specific tasks might be data warehouse processing, financial engineering portfolio evaluation, or medical imaging.) In terms of their plans for this product, what elements would you consider essential, within the general domain of issues covered in this course? Be sure to consider the architecture of the processor itself, the plans for manufacturing it, and the plans for making sure customers have available software applications that run on this processor or appropriate software tools that allow customers to develop their own applications. Your plans may or may not consider cooperation with other companies as an essential element.

From Hari Balakrishnan <hari@desolation.CS.Berkeley.EDU>

Assumptions: We assume that the specific domain targeted by the engineers is one of low-power processor design for handheld devices and laptop computers.

Reconfigurability: This is a good domain for reconfigurable processors and architectures because the primary requirement here is for low power consumption. The technical vision is that by selectively turning the differential functional units of the hardware into different modes (e.g., on, off, 50%, 25% etc.), power consumption can be traded off against desired performance.

Here are some important isseus that need to be considered by us, as Venture Capitalists.