At FCCM 2013, I was on a panel to discuss Reconfigurable Computing in the Era of Dark Silicon. If you haven’t heard of the Dark Silicon meme in the computer architecture community, I recommend you review Michael Taylor (UCSD)‘s slides from DaSi 2012.

It’s difficult to take these things out of context, but here for posterity’s sake are my position slides: Gray-Dark Silicon and HeMPPAAs. I emphasize that orders of magnitude energy efficiency improvements might be achieved by building workload-optimized computers in FPGAs using a HeMPPAA (heterogeneous massively parallel processor and accelerator arrays) architecture. I also propose infrastructure investments so that FPGA design in the large is much more like the software development experience.