Re: Who Needs Programmers When You Need Hardware Designers?
"It does still require a certain degree of mind-warping to program FPGAs in these languages, [...]"
In my experience many programmers do not have the mind set to handle parallel processes. In the early days most programmers wrote their code as a serial thread - totally ignorant of the multitasking that was taking place in the OS and other applications. Their brains just froze when they tried to think about asynchronous parallel threads.
Expert system languages demanded that you wrote about decisions that were evaluated in parallel - even if the underlying code was still constrained to be serial through the cpu.
When microcomputers came along many IT people saw them as small computers. It took a while to start remembering that microprocessors could replace hardware logic. Then they forgot that custom hardware is much faster because it can do things in parallel.
FPGAs were the disruptor. People generally treated them as low volume ASICs - to be implemented by hardware designers for one task only. The idea that the FPGA could be reloaded and reconfigured in flight - as, when, and how the cpu software desired - was often a difficult one to grasp.
The use of GPUs for other types of computation rather than graphics took a while to catch on. FPGAs are still in a similar position - seen as "assisted" hardware rather then a natural component of "software" that fits certain tasks in the structure of an application.
Like all computing - a seamless FPGA/cpu application programming language needs to allow the programmer to express their real world problem in a "natural" way that suits the context. The compiler then takes care of who does what and when. You don't worry about whether the FPGA configuration is optimum - as long as the overall result gives a significant improvement in development time and performance.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
