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GHz vs Core count

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It looks like hybrid FPGA+ CPU chips are the future. Note that Intel purchased Altera who along with Xilinx and Microsemi were one of the larger FPGA companies.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3230929/data-center/intel-unveils-hybrid-cpu-fpga-plans.html

FPGAs have a vibrant hardware hacker (in the best sense of the word) market and I would not be surprised to see them proliferate.

So I can directly speak to that as FPGA/CPLDs are my area of expertise.

Intel has a few Xeon+FPGA CPUs out there, and they are interesting. However, they do nothing more than bring the FPGA up close to the cores. They do not get to manipulate the pipeline or anything like that. Their Logic Element count is also very low, so not too much you can do with it just yet. Recently I have looked into trying to find parts that incorporate ARM+FPGA for board control purposes, but those don't exist either. Not because we can't but mostly because there is no market. There is not a huge market for FPGA+CPU type chips yet, but its a trend to watch. Networking will be the first to get chips with FPGAs as you can do some swifty tricks to help filter, and accelerate packets at a very low level and without any messy software control. IIRC OCP has a few talking points on that matter.

What will happen though is more processes will be pushed out of the CPU into more custom corses: DSP, FPGAs, and GPUs are just some of the few that are planned right now.
 
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