via HtP - Self-generating processors advance

Design tools are becoming so deft they may one day put designers out of a job. Hewlett-Packard Co. has just turned out a processor around its self-generating VLIW core, and is advancing the technology in anticipation of a day when a machine will be able to design a machine. Tensilica Inc. is also experimenting with ways to let a compiler choose the optimal processor architecture using only C-language inputs. It recently demonstrated a tool that takes less than a minute to generate gates for a fast Fourier transform algorithm.