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June 6, 1944, D-Day, was undoubtedly an important date in history. History may record June 8, 1999 as potentially even more earthshaking.
On June 8, 1999 a small, Salt Lake City, Utah, company named Star Bridge Systems announced that it has developed a technology that may "revolutionize the world of computers and electronics." If it works, their prediction may be even more far reaching than their somewhat immodest-- sounding announcement suggests.
Star Bridge Systems (SBS) announced that it had developed what it called Hypercomputers-reconfigurable computers that are orders of magnitude faster than any previous computers. Within 18 months, for example, the company may be offering a $1000 desktop computer with performance that matches many of today's supercomputers. This low-- priced computer will deliver 100bips performance. The computer will deliver performance that is three orders of magnitude higher than today's PC, according to Kent Gilson, the company's chief technology officer and the brain behind the hypercomputer.
The architecture behind the reconfigurable computing technology uses one or more circuit boards with FPGAs, Field Programmable Gate Arrays, that can be reprogrammed at thousands of times a second. In effect, an FPGA can become an optimally tuned computer that is ideally programmed for each required computing task. Materials provided by the company compare reconfigurable computing to the process that the human brain performs, programming itself to solve new problems and changing the programming as often as necessary.
The massively parallel architecture of the hypercomputer can create new links between FPGAs, just as cells in the brain can create or change links, in order to optimize performance. With the addition of each FPGA, significant performance boosts are accomplished.
The consumer PC that is being developed is expected to be easily upgradable, with upgrades possibly being as easy as downloading improved software. Further, the consumer model will run the most popular software with operating system emulators,...