While the panelists took a range of positions in the hardware vs. software debate, it was Robert Brodersen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who took up the banner most vehemently for hardware solutions. He also challenged the software model, saying that it was a legacy of the pioneers of computing in the middle of this century for whom cost, size and power consumption were not an issue. Purposefully built hardware is much better able to reflect the parallelism of the original algorithms, he said. The flexibility of software, most often touted by the panelists as its key advantage, was not universally true, Brodersen argued. Software is becoming harder than hardware.
People are afraid to change the software in case it breaks the system.
Some of the arguments he marshalled were that while power efficiency and die size may favor a hardware solution, such solutions naturally require smaller volumes than more general CPUs, and that volume drives price. Dobberpuhl's final argument was that software would be the more fertile area of development because there were almost no barriers to entry. He also observed that while both pure software and pure hardware solutions can be viable in different applications, there is also a middle road. FPGAs are the fastest growth area. They can be faster than a processor but slower than dedicated hardware.