The FPGA could do faster version of Midi with accurate time stamping, which CPUs don't
always do easily, and the hard-coded FPGA stuff would never be interrupted by kernel
activity, etc.
Also, FPGAs can be really quite fast for important computations, I've used a
$100 Zynq
board to demo that here a while ago, where it beats a decent I7 in double
precision
trigonometric computations flat out.
It's like with a modern environment like I've tried , Vivado + Vivado_HLS, which is free
to use, compiling from C code directly to FPGA blocks is possible, and there are
(I happen to have used Xilinx but there are others) communication primitives
with quite
some speed available to communicate with ARM programs running on Linux.
I wouldn't say that when I tried some past versions of all this out it works
perfect and
easy, but the potential of it, especially computations involving fine grained
parallelism
and synchronization patterns, is quite good and leads to a block approach that
can be
powerful in comparison with semi/real parallel programming.
T.V.
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