"Vista User" <> wrote in message
news:fdh0hn$jhj$...
> Scotty is looking for you in the transporter room.
>
You shouldn't laugh too soon.
A few years ago I worked with a company in Oxford who were working on
compilers that produced hardware.
The hardware was in the form of programmable gate arrays.
It could do some interesting things:-
like a game that had moving "sprites" and land masses to navigate.. all done
without any CPU and done in a parallel way.. so parallel there wasn't even a
screen buffer, the display was generated on the fly.
another one that was done for us was a voip phone.. everything was compiled
onto the silicon including the IP stack.
Only one thing I saw used a "processor" and that was a java engine and even
that was complied from a "C" like source. It ran a web browser and was used
to select and load which bit of hardware you were going to use.
It took about a second to change the hardware from one task to another.
I haven't keep track of the technology since, but I might have a look if I
can remember who it was.
http://www.xilinx.com/publications/x...8-cebatech.pdf
gives details of a similar system but I don't think it was the one I played
with.
Its only a matter of time before computers are replaced by reconfigurable
hardware and then the Mac/PC and OS wars will be over (maybe).