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by akiselev 1996 days ago
High end FPGAs are theoretically capable of millisecond fast partial reconfigurations but doing so requires making a lot of tradeoffs that just highlight the impedance mismatch between the generic nature of CPUs and the purgatory that is FPGAs. The more of the FPGA you want to reconfigure, the longer it takes (stop the world, depending on which parts its touches) and unless the reconfigured portion is limited to a standard bus, the reconfiguration won't work (or you have to reconfigure more of the design to deal with different interfaces, timings, etc. blowing up reconfiguration time and defeating the purpose). All of the bitstreams have to be compiled ahead of time as well.

Unless latency is so critical that the speed of light is the limiting factor, partial reconfiguration just replaces PCIe with a much harder to work with AXI interconnect (or similar, but it always end up being AXI...).