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It's excellent to see FPGAs being increasingly utilised. As moore's law no longer holds true for CPU, there is increasing interest turning to FPGAs. You can cr

It's excellent to see FPGAs being increasingly utilised. As moore's law no longer holds true for CPU, there is increasing interest turning to FPGAs. You can create a truly bespoke Processor for any task. Of course this is trade of between development time / cost vs processing needs of task. I suspect FPGAs demand to only increse over the coming years. Intel's integration of FPGA into their line of processors is a promising step and sign of where things may be heading.

jcfrei 10y ago
Do you think that consumer applications (like games, 3D rendering, etc. ) will eventually require FPGAs?
- doc_holliday 10y ago
  It's possible that if FPGAs continue to improve as they are and catch up with ASICs in terms of density and price then reconfigurable HW may become a possibility. At the moment, most of those task would be done on ASIC, so yes we might see those tasks done on FPGA. There wouldn't be advantage in performance generally, only in that you could have true HW updates. It is something I've been thinking about in that you could theoretically have a processor optimized for the game. So you could download HW on the fly (pre built) and flash your machines FPGA.
- chclau 10y ago
  There is a trend on integrating processor, FPGA, memory and high bandwidth pipes between them on a single package. Database heavy applications are among the first adopting these architectures, it can be that others will follow.
BenoitP 10y ago
I wonder if common boring languages/runtimes, say Java/JVM, are easily amenable to making use of on-die FPGAs. Will we see a new generation of JITs emitting FPGA code?
- doc_holliday 10y ago
  Unlikely for many years (if ever), compiling HDL down to an image to flash FPGA with takes hours. Routing wires etc is very difficult process and is very compute intensive. JIT for FPGA is quite possibly mathematically impossible.
- pjc50 10y ago
  FPGAs do not take "code" that is sequentially executed and are not really amenable to JIT for a whole number of reasons. Some but not all of those could be overcome with the help of the manufacturers. It's much better if you regard an FPGA as a set of pluggable fixed-function dataflow integer pipelines than a processor. Something that you stream data into and get a transformed version out. It's much less recognisable than even a GPU. Consider it the next step beyond SSE/MMX for configurable arithmetic kernels. The one thing on-die FPGAs will definitely help with is cryptography.
SixSigma 10y ago
> It's excellent to see FPGAs being increasingly utilised. why ?

jcfrei 10y ago

Do you think that consumer applications (like games, 3D rendering, etc. ) will eventually require FPGAs?

doc_holliday 10y ago
It's possible that if FPGAs continue to improve as they are and catch up with ASICs in terms of density and price then reconfigurable HW may become a possibility. At the moment, most of those task would be done on ASIC, so yes we might see those tasks done on FPGA. There wouldn't be advantage in performance generally, only in that you could have true HW updates. It is something I've been thinking about in that you could theoretically have a processor optimized for the game. So you could download HW on the fly (pre built) and flash your machines FPGA.
chclau 10y ago
There is a trend on integrating processor, FPGA, memory and high bandwidth pipes between them on a single package. Database heavy applications are among the first adopting these architectures, it can be that others will follow.

BenoitP 10y ago

I wonder if common boring languages/runtimes, say Java/JVM, are easily amenable to making use of on-die FPGAs. Will we see a new generation of JITs emitting FPGA code?

doc_holliday 10y ago
Unlikely for many years (if ever), compiling HDL down to an image to flash FPGA with takes hours. Routing wires etc is very difficult process and is very compute intensive. JIT for FPGA is quite possibly mathematically impossible.
pjc50 10y ago
FPGAs do not take "code" that is sequentially executed and are not really amenable to JIT for a whole number of reasons. Some but not all of those could be overcome with the help of the manufacturers. It's much better if you regard an FPGA as a set of pluggable fixed-function dataflow integer pipelines than a processor. Something that you stream data into and get a transformed version out. It's much less recognisable than even a GPU. Consider it the next step beyond SSE/MMX for configurable arithmetic kernels. The one thing on-die FPGAs will definitely help with is cryptography.

SixSigma 10y ago

> It's excellent to see FPGAs being increasingly utilised. why ?