Stretch S5000
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The Stretch S5000 and Stretch S6000 software-configurable processors families are manufactured by Stretch, Inc.
According to the manufacturer, these families of devices embed programmable logic entirely inside a software-programmable processor architecture, with the intent of giving the processor the ease of development associated with general-purpose processors with the flexibility and potentially better performance of programmable logic.
Users of these processors develop their applications in familiar programming languages C or C++. The source code is automatically analyzed and compute-intensive blocks of code are chosen and used to synthesize custom processor instructions. This has the potential of improving performance, as the processor specializes itself to the task at hand at the hardware level instead of solving the problem by generic, factory-programmed instructions.
Recent developments in software configurable processors have seen memory added to the programmable logic inside the processor to provide for temporary data storage for the custom processor instructions. Larger scale integration has also resulted in software configurable processors providing complete system capability with integrated I/Os and application specific accelerators.
Examples of this later class of software configurable processor can be seen in the Stretch S6000 which the manufacturer claims has been optimized for video and wireless processing applications.
Learn more about Stretch at http://www.stretchinc.com
