3 ms·

Will the future not be CPU,GPU,FPGA integrated circuit? At least for some server applications that would make sense to gain maximum efficiency. http://www.thep

• dogma1138 11y ago
  FPGA's are never as efficient as dedicated silicon they are flexible but that flexibility comes at a huge cost both in performance and materials. FPGA's are used in situations where it's not commercially viable to spin your own chips and where you can offset the high cost of FPGA's to your consumer. If anything the "future" might be in on-demand core configs similar to how modern ARM SOC's are being built from a combination of "small" and "big" cores with different features and performance head space that allows for more efficient power usage for small devices. So core-specific optimizations for different applications (Database, Web Server, Video Streaming etc.) might be quite possible especially when combined with user-programmable micro-code might be much better than FPGA's. Basically you might have a dedicated CPU (that you might even be able to partial design yourself by submitting VLSI code or something similar) which is specifically tuned for your application e.g. a web application server CPU with 4 big cores that handle executing the application code it self, with additional smaller cores that handle things like HTTP, SSL, session cache etc. each with dedicated register/extensions optimized for those actions e.g. LZMA or AES extensions.
  • sklogic 11y ago
    FPGAs with larger cells (e.g., entire ALUs) can potentially beat all the shit out of GPUs in most use cases (because of the better control over memories). You'll have the best of both worlds here - routing flexibility of FPGAs and fast ASIC cells.
    • dogma1138 11y ago
      That's not really true FPGA CPU's tend to be very slow relatively to the speed of the FPGA and comparable ASIC's. Yes you can program the FPGA to do say LZMA very quickly but you can just as well build a dedicated SIMD ASIC that will do the same and at much lower cost. If you design your CPU to include current ISA big cores combined with small mission specific SIMD ASIC's it will be better than building a CPU with additional FPGA cores or building a CPU on an FPGA which is an insanity to begin with. I would yield that FPGA are more flexible but if you can build more or less flexible SIMD ASIC's that are user configurable you will get a similar flexibility to FPGA's with better performance still, eventually there's a limit to how many non-generic operations the CPU handles and there will be a fairly low limit on how many of those will deserve dedicated silicon before you over-optimize and lose performance.
      • sklogic 11y ago
        I am talking of really large but generic cells, much bigger then the current DSP slices. This way FPGA will be a programmable dataflow machine with all the heavy lifting done by the ASIC ALU slices. And it is much more flexible than hoarding the very specific ASIC blocks. Any problem I was solving on GPUs recently would have been implemented 100x times more efficiently on such an architecture.
        • dogma1138 11y ago
          large and generic cells seem to be exactly what the current GPU architectures bring, and where did the 100x times number came from?
          • sklogic 11y ago
            The current GPUs have to deal with a cumbersome, often unfit memory hierarchy. What an FPGA-like model would bring is a much more flexible way to configure the local memories layout. Source - experience of getting over 100x difference in performance wity memory opimisations alone.
• pjc50 11y ago
  FPGAs aren't all that great for throughput unless your problem is massively parallel but not memory dependent. The real benefit of an FPGA is low latency. But the tooling remains sufficiently awful (and closed) that it's not going to be accessible to average programmers any time soon. And what on earth is the security/multitasking model of an onboard FPGA?