Embedded.com looks at the long history of acceleration

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Embedded.com featured an article some time ago (I’m digging through my backlog) on the convergence of the lessons in accelerated computing learned by the embedded processing community and the needs of the HPC community.

A little known fact in the HPC community is that the embedded computing market has always solved their problems with a combination of CPUs and accelerators.

…As these two markets collide, the emergence of some of the world’s largest companies from HPC and HPEC are now working together (Intel, AMD, Altera, and Xilinx) to make x86 CPUs with their own internal accelerators and easy to access external FPGA accelerators the solution of choice for both HPC and HPEC. As CPU-bound software-only solutions require the benefits of hardware acceleration to remain competitive, architects must figure out what to accelerate and how to make the price, performance, and power trade-offs that meet market requirements.

The article mostly focuses on FPGAs, but is interesting nonetheless and has some general takeaways.