My understanding of FPGAs is that they are chips which can implement the designs of other chips as desired. Is there a limit to the types of instruction set architectures and/or complexity that FPGAs can implement? For example, could a single FPGA chip implement an x86 ISA and then an ARM ISA? And hypothetically, within an ARM implementation, could a FPGA chip implement the equivalent of, say, an older chip like the Apple A4 and a newer, more complex one like the Apple M2?
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There are limits, but it’s more about the complexity of the circuit than the ISA itself. To implement a bigger processor you need a bigger FPGA, and a FPGA capable of implementing a large modern CPU design might cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but companies will still pay it because it’s cheaper to validate on the FPGA than find mistakes after manufacturing the design as an ASIC.
You can also buy FPGAs that come with ARM cores on the side, so you don’t have to spend the expensive fpga fabric replicating them, better performance too.
If you want to know exactly what the limitations of a particular FPGA are, you can read the datasheet, but be warned that those are usually hundreds of pages long.
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