rachitnigam

You can express full CPU designs in Calyx (in fact, we have) because it is a superset of a hardware description language. However, Calyx will probably not provide any substantial benefit in this case because there are not that many opportunities to optimize things.

The premise of Calyx is you're generating hardware designs from high-level code which has a lot more structure than arbitrary HDL code and the compiler will use that extra structure to automatically do optimizations that cannot be done over arbitrary HDL code.

All of those things. Most HLS tools use the CDFG to generate optimized resource bindings and area-aware optimizations.

Author of Calyx here. Good question! Usually, you can use OpenCL based drivers to interface with standard memory interfaces on FPGAs.

ASICs require a lot more work by either packaging on the same chip as a processor or building IO interfaces for their own package.

But again, this notion of "outsiders" is very gatekeepy. There have been substaintial successes in using high-level programming models for hardware design.

The Google VCU paper explicitly mentions using such tools made them faster. All of these is enabled by people looking at problems with a fresh perspective

Author of Calyx here. I always find these arguments quite reductive but will nonetheless entertain them.

"Developing Hardware is a solved problem"

For which audience specifically? Maybe if you consider giant teams at large corps pouring in millions. Is it a solved problem for hobbyists, students, people who're just curious? Most people who're curious about software can go play with it in 15 mins. For hardware, it's more like months.

"If you need pseudo-DSL ..."

Weirdly gatekeepy. Why should hardware be only used by experts? There's lot you could've said about it being hard to optimize hardware well (which is challenging with HDLs too) but instead choose this argument.

"You cannot abstract away this engineering task" The goal of research is to try to do things differently. We already know how to build hardware using HDLs, with waterfall models and giant teams. We want to figure out if there are better ways to do it.

The VLSI revolution wouldn't have happened if randos on the internet kept complaining about how "we already know how to do full custom design" and "you cannot abstract physics". We did before, and it changed the world. Let's have some optimism.

You’re thinking of 6110 (advanced programming languages) not 6120