Two Roads Diverge: How To Accelerate Your Future Part 2: Software
Thursday May 14, 2020By Julie DiBene
Director, Marketing Communications
MoSys, Inc.
In Part 1 of this blog series, we covered the benefits of choosing MoSys hardware solutions and why customers would consider hardware to be of greater benefit to their upcoming design efforts. In Part 2, we will cover the technical aspects of choosing software and why designers would diverge to choose software.
MoSys goal when developing software solutions was to deploy a Cloud computing-like strategy that encompassed flexible provisioning with a virtual machine that MoSys calls Virtual Accelerator Engines. The solutions are designed to protect our customer’s software investments across a range of applications for a family of products. In addition, we wanted solutions that would easily meet future unknown performance requirements.
The MoSys Software/firmware Application Acceleration Platform products feature a common API and a common RTL if using an FGPA. We strove to architect common software and hardware interfaces that are easily understood by software and hardware architects so they could integrate solutions quickly and easily. Due to the way MoSys has defined and designed the VAE, with a common and portable API when using software and a common RTL interface when using hardware, it supports an easy portability when running on different performance targeted hardware environments. With an ultimate performance platform being one that takes advantage of the MoSys Accelerator Engine products which provide a range of scalable hardware performance levels. The differentiator that is seen with the MoSys VAE platform is the breath of options that are offered. The exact same function is scaled for performance from running as “C” code only on a GPU which will provide functionality but lowest performance all the way through to a dedicated PHE device with custom firmware to provide the highest performance. The estimated range of performance that spans from 30M accesses a second up to 3 Billion accesses a second. All while maintaining a common API that interfaces to the User Logic.
All of this brings me full circle, back to Robert Frost’s poem I have always loved by Robert Frost called The Road Not Taken. As a reminder, the poem begins:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
But my favorite part is the ending of the poem which reads:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
May you always have the option to take the road less traveled by and may it make all the difference.
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