An overview of selected hybrid and reconfigurable architectures

Node level heterogeneous architectures have become attractive during the last decade for several reasons: Compared to traditional symmetric CPUs, they offer high real-application performance and can be energy and/or cost efficient. In this paper, we give an overview of the state-of-the-art in heterogeneous computing, focusing on commonly found architectures: The Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA), NVidia graphics processing units (GPUs), and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) accelerators solutions from Maxeler MaxNodes (MAX) and SGI systems (RASC). We present a review of hardware, available software tools for each solution, a quantitative and a qualitative comparison of the architectures, and give our view on the future of heterogeneous computing.