[Coco] Fwd: Re: Multi Core FPGA ?

[Dave Philipsen]

So even if an FPGA board was designed for multi-core cpu, whatever features were present on that board would have been designed for a very specific type of implementation. There are so many possible ways that you could implement such a beast.

I’ve thought that it might be interesting to actually design a board with two VGA ports, two keyboard ports, two separate memory chips and then you could run two independent CPUs and perhaps use internal block ram in dual-port mode as a communication channel between the two.

Another idea might be to use a single vga and keyboard port but to split the display so that one side of the screen was controlled by one cpu and the other side by the other.  A hot key on the keyboard could allow you to ‘connect’ the keyboard to one cpu or the other.  Lots of possibilities.

Dave

Sent from my iPad

> On Jul 23, 2018, at 5:48 PM, Mark McDougall <msmcdoug at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> 
>> On 24/07/2018 8:45 AM, Mark McDougall wrote:
>> 
>> There's _nothing_ that can be done in hardware on the PCB to better facilitate multiple cores in the FPGA. 
> 
> OK perhaps that blanket statement was going a little far. For example, multiple RAM devices on separate buses would make emulation of multiple cores _easier_ to have their own address space, but that doesn't preclude it being done with a single RAM bus.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> -- 
> Mark McDougall
> <http://retroports.blogspot.com.au>
> 
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