Cool projects emerge all the time and I love the nostalgic ones that bring my favourite games or pieces of software forward in time. The arrival of Central Processing Units (CPUs) was a ground breaking innovation brought to the world by Frederico Faggin in the form of the Intel 4004. Featuring speeds of 740 kHz and 4 bits of data width, it was the gateway to a new era and the industry has continued to make leaps and strides in the world of computational technology ever since. A few years later, the introduction of Field-programmable gate arrays would arrive from Xilinx in 1984. They are custom integrated circuits that are created for specific use cases that are supposed to offer greater energy, speed, latency and data connectivity advantages. FPGAs were once all the rage for BTC mining, but we can’t forget about Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASICs) that made their debut around the same time too. ASICs offer greater energy efficiency but we’re focusing on FPGAs for a reason today.
FPGAs are currently being pushed as viable avenues for software engineering of the future. It remains to be seen if FPGAs can thrive in the coming years, especially with ASICs in the picture. We’ll take a look at the historic development of these custom integrated circuits in a future post but I would like to emphasise that engineering for FPGAs is difficult and relies on mastery of Hardware Description Languages. While Turing complete offers all necessary tools to create desired programmes. Production, optimizing and compilation is significantly harder even with High Level Synthesis (HLS) available on modern FPGAs. With these basic elements of FPGA development in mind, you might understand (or not) why I was impressed when a videogame made its way to one. My eyes opened a little wider when reading the first line of this tweet:
https://twitter.com/sylefeb/status/1258808333265514497
The DooM-chip is something pretty cool, it’s completely dedicated to running DOOM and nothing else. This game has been around the block and the meme “can it run DOOM” will probably remain to be for generations to come. Even Tesla navigation systems can play the game in some manner but this is a first for an almost barebones metal device. While this project isn’t significant in the way of tech, it does showcase engineering skill and that DOOM will quite literally run on anything and this is mostly due to available information that has been made openly available over the years. For now, there are no enemies but it’s a cool start to yet another DOOM port. There are requests to see the project brought over to MiSTer FPGA, perhaps community involvement will accelerate development. It’s great to see Doomguy again...and again!
https://blog.esciencecenter.nl/why-use-an-fpga-instead-of-a-cpu-or-gpu-b234cd4f309c
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array
