Heterogeneous Computing Meets the Data Center

Ron Wilson, Editor-in-Chief, Altera Corporation

As we push single-CPU performance deeper into diminishing returns and begin extracting the last big gains from multicore processors, computing experts are turning to another old idea—heterogeneous multiprocessing—as the next way to advance. In heterogeneous systems, different kinds of processors—x86 CPUs and FPGAs, for example—cooperate on a computing task. Heterogeneous architectures are already widely used in the mobile world, where ARM® CPUs, graphics processing units (GPUs), encryption engines, and digital signal processing (DSP) cores routinely work together, often on a single die. But what happens when these techniques arrive at that nexus of digital existence, the data center? A workshop at the 2014 International Symposium on FPGAs sought to find out.

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