SergeyS's blog

It looks like the current concept of PC Motherboard should start getting re-thought.

These 3 items: CPU, RAM, Videocard are logically pretty much decoupled from the rest of the PC System Unit. And when the RAM will be getting nonvolatile, - I don't see why this "brain" should not get physically decoupled from the rest of hardware on the Mother Board. I'd call the rest of hardware - the "spinal column".

That logical "spinal column" would actually be a small PCB, say of nano ITX format with the single (or so) chip to control all the peripherals and provide very basic video and very basic CPU power. So, that without the "brain" it would be equal to "Celeron"-based PC just to be able of doing some office work or so.

This block should feature some fast backbone to get connected to "brain". The "brain" - a set of one or more PCBs to hold powerful integrated circuits - FPGA or CPLD with their RAM. These "brain" blocks should be universal in the future and may or may not contain video connector. The running application would reconfigure FPGA/CPLD "on the fly" to address its current needs - max performance or whatever like it was described in my previous post "Blank-Powerful-Client Architecture" http://weblogs.asp.net/sergeys/archive/2009/08/25/blank-powerful-client-architecture.aspx.

What I'd like to (humbly:-) expect from Microsoft in the reasonable future is to cooperate with some FPGA/CPLD provider to produce a Dev Kit with FPGA/CPLD on-board. And MS .NET platform would contain libraries to create the configuration for FPGA/CPLD, load it, run it, and communicate to running FPGA/CPLD.