Monday, August 14, 2006

Rapport Inc.

I picked up last month's Tech Review and I discovered this startup looking to make chips with 1000 8 bit cores. The RAMP Project and the RAW project are extremely relevant to Rapport. Looks a lot like they're taking the RAW chip commercial... I hope that they don't blow through all of their funding attempting to manufacture a chip without establishing a software development environment and a market first.

I approach reconfigurable computing as a software problem first and a hardware problem second. It's something I believe makes business sense, given that COTS reconfigurable chips already exist but no real software exists for them yet. Since no one in the FPGA world has come up with a software methodology for reconfigurable computing, it's hard to imagine how new hardware that looks not to dissimilar to an FPGA will somehow enable a new software paradigm. The Tech Review article hit on these issues and it looks like there are some Quicksilver alumni on Rapport's staff, so hopefully they'll leverage their experience in this area.

These chips look pretty cool to me. Hopefully I can "get my shit together" quickly enough and get a team of geeks together to make OS support.

1 comment:

Jeff Doak said...

What happened to the kilocore idea? I haven't seen any updates on it in years.