The New DSP
Are FPGAs Really It?

On the fading footsteps of the fury of the Supercomputing conference, our minds typically whirl on the world of accelerated computation.  We picture powerful systems based on elegant devices that crunch through complex calculations at an almost inconceivable speed.  When we visualize that, of course, we don’t always think about the fact that the “sea level” of compute power is in an ever-increasing tide surge.  As the common desktop computer climbs ever higher in compute performance, many problems and applications that were once the purview of supercomputers have been conquered by the common.  Even some applications previously considered infeasible have now been well handled by the consumer-grade laptop’s compute capabilities.

All this commoditization of computing power has narrowed and pushed the field of applications requiring acceleration in interesting directions.  Not that many years ago, digital video processing was almost a pipe dream.  Now, for standard definition at least, that’s a solved and simple problem - even for the most pedestrian computing equipment.  The list goes on and on, but the killer applications of yesteryear – including the mass market dynamic dualism of video and audio -- have mostly fallen by the wayside.  Now, however, those applications have found a second wind as some of the best compute power hogs of this decade.  Thanks to our desire for more channels of audio and more pixels of video in our entertainment systems, and thanks to our newfound desire to do real-time analysis of video streams from various sources, we have enough number crunching to keep ourselves busy creating cool computing hardware for at least the next few years.  [more]