Larrabee with FPGA pledge

Following up on my pledge to Intel for including a real-time reprogrammable highspeed FPGA on Larrabee, it looks like it's definitely very useful in a number of applications. With texture filtering being done in hardware with Larrabee running as a GPU, we could reprogram the FPGA to do motion search for H264 encoding. We're now going into a new era where computer engineers are very good in both software and hardware design.

I suggested the idea of including an FPGA as part of the CPU to a fellow employee / manager back in Intel but unfortunately, it never got any attention. That was back in year 2001. 7 years following that, we're now seeing companies making full use of FPGAs to accelerate applications that aren't efficient to be run on a CPU. Larrabee solves some of the things I said an FPGA would solve, but there are definitely several other applications out there that would benefit from an FPGA. I also pointed out that Intel should come up with a library (i.e. hardware design) that developers can simply load into the FPGA to accelerate specific types of algos.

Take a look at this.