Reconfigurable Cores Boost Processor Power

by Clive Maxfield EE Times, 20 Feb 2006 The first commercial microprocessor debuted in 1971 with 2,300 transistors, a 108-kHz system clock, and a 4-bit bus. Since then, chip architects have increased the computational performance and throughput of successors by increasing the transistor count, the data bus width or the clock speed, and by introducing such execution-related tweaks as pipelining and speculative execution. But as those traditional techniques run out of steam, microprocessor and system designers are breaking out of the mold and crafting architectures that combine multiple processing cores combined with reconfigurable computing techniques. Read more