FPGA-FSB, a possible conduit for startups

There were several announcements and articles during Intel’s developer Forum in Beijing in April regarding FPGA-FSB; however, it seems the excitement seems to have settled since then. This frankly is a little puzzling, considering the fact that Intel is allowing for others to use their FSB to communicate with the rest of the systems, which seems rather exciting. Usually, the barrier to entry for developing high-performance components to work with the rest of the system was pretty high. One could either opt to develop an entire board that would plug into one of the existing slot on the motherboard, or one could go the external route and interface through one of the external connectors. But for really high-performance computing, neither of the beforehand mentioned solutions was really a good answer. With this new plug-in possibility, a company only needs to obtain one of the socket compatible FPGA chips and then they can develop from there. The FPGA already contains all the functionality to connect with the Intel FSB, so the developers can focus on the actual co-processing they want to provide, and on the software which will take advantage of it. While the barrier to entry is still not as low as that for internet applications and a dot-com style gold rush is not to be expected, potentially several new startups could emerge that could take advantage of the fact that any new hardware designs they might conceive off could be prototyped and interacting with the rest of the systems in a rather short time. The idea itself of having an FSB compatible FPGA chip is not exactly new, a company called DRC Computer has been providing such chips for multi-way AMD Opteron systems now for over a year; however, Intel’s adoption of the concept has significantly expanded the market for potential startups.