Talk:Reconfigurable computing

The reason why one should not change reconfigurable computing to reconfigurable system is to understand what exactly reconfigurable computing addresses. To baseline; a computer system is defined as an organised collection of hardware and software components designed to manipulate data in a meaningful manner. An abstract way to model such computer systems is to use a method called computer system model (CSM). CSM is composed of three architecture types providing clear abstraction level views to a computer system. These architecture types are known as computer architecture (CA) which is everything to do with the CPU, implementation architecture (IA) which is everything to do with the platform and software architecture (SA) also known as system architecture and deals with the software domain of a computer system.

  Computer Architecture addresses the organisation and design of the CPU, a basic CPU is composed of two domains which are; Control Path and Data Path.  However, these two domains are heavily influenced by the computational configuration adopted. There are two computation configurations which are; Temporal –compute in time and Spatial –compute in space. Examples of temporal solutions would be; Pentium, Opteron, Xeon, Itanium, Power and SPARC. And examples of spatial would be ASICs. 

  Without delving deep into CPU design a short synopsis would be; CPUs that use a temporal configuration generally has a large control path over the data path. As an example the Itanium McKinley has a control path of ~71% and a data path of ~7.4% the remaining area is used for miscellaneous circuitry. Whereas an ASIC, the ideal spatial solution will use ~80% data path and 15% control path. Spatial solutions like ASICs offer greater performance/watt/cycle than there temporal solutions, which, temporal solutions counteract this by offering better application flexibility through programmability.

  Reconfigurable Computing (RC) introduces a third type of computation configuration which is a mix between temporal and spatial. How the blend of this mix is done depends on the innovation of the RC. As I described earlier computational configuration influences the CA’s control and data paths, and RC is a new form of computational configuration thus, RC is not a computer system it is in fact an architectural form of CA. Which means the best suited name is Reconfigurable Computing and not Reconfigurable System.