Chapter 6: Math, Parallelism, and Pipelined Design

Microprocessors are custom designed ASICs that can have very high performance when running at very high frequencies – up to 5 Ghz as of writing this book. These processors are general-purpose, meaning they need to balance their operations for a wide variety of tasks. In contrast, the Artix 7 we are targeting can hit speeds of up to 300-400 Mhz. Higher-end FPGAs can hit speeds of up to 800 Mhz. Unlike microprocessors, FPGAs can be targeted for a specific application. Because of this, we can utilize design techniques such as parallelism; that is, replicating logic in order to perform more tasks for a given clock cycle than a microprocessor can. We can also use pipelining to achieve a high throughput.

In this chapter, we will look deeper at fixed-point numbers with regards to our temperature sensor. We'll also look at floating-point numbers and see why we might want to use one over the other. Then, we'll look at the...