>> slide 39 onwards at how they view servers as an opportunity and are used by a number of large data centers. They now have big FPGAs with multi core albeit rather low level 64 bit processors.
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So why doesn't Google just use the Altera boards ? And save themselves $200m and 4 years of work.
I have posted about Altera's FPGA's with embedded ARM cores several times.
In those systems, the usual task of the conventional processor core is to load the FPGA logic from an external storage, then get out of the way. Or perhaps feed parameter changes to it as a continuing operation.
The ARM core's portion of the cost is like $5 out of a $100. Not sure of the numbers, but I think the ratio is correct.
This is nothing like a full blown high performance CPU with a user tweak added. Not even in principle. The Altera system is designed like this, and it can only work in this mode.
So for your idea to work, first we need a functioning ARM CPU that can work as a respectable server chip. Then we need someone to tweak it with a foreign block.
I'll start to worry about Intel when the an ARM chip starts to take server share.
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