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So what's changed that FPGA's are making a come back? They were all the rage in 2008/9...however that faded relatively quickly when people realized programming

by jcbeard 10y ago

So what's changed that FPGA's are making a come back? They were all the rage in 2008/9...however that faded relatively quickly when people realized programming them was a hassle and that programming had direct implications to synthesizability/clock speed/area. Looks like Google Trends shows a downward spiral in interest from 2004 to present, so my intuition was close. OpenCL->HDL and Vivado's C/C++ -> HDL makes the process a bit easier, but it's still not as easy as writing optimized C code. To get perf on an FPGA over a hard core you must go very wide (as in lots of parallelism). I suspect you could order custom hard cores from places like Tensilica and get far better perf/watt. I love FPGA's, they thrive on parallel integer/fixed point codes if enough time is put into designing the pipeline. It seems for most float heavy codes a hard core unit at a higher clock rate with a dedicated MMU is much better? Am I missing something that changes that?

vertex-four 10y ago
FPGAs have been "all the rage" in a handful of fields for a reasonable amount of time. It just happens to be that most fields don't actually need FPGAs at all, and a CPU and maybe a GPU to go with it works just fine.
asimuvPR 10y ago
This won't directly answer your question but FPGA boards are now more accessible to hobbyists. That helps with popularity.
- jcbeard 10y ago
  not sure they haven't always been fairly accessible? I suppose prices are now dirt cheap vs. 2010/11 where I'd have to pay 300-400 for a mediocre FPGA (I've used digilent for years, prices on there have dropped quite fast in the last two years or so). then again, atmel had an FPGA co-processor for awhile at a relatively cheap price (can't remember the name...probably X28 with some characters), but still not really capable of running a neural network at any appreciable depth.
  - asimuvPR 10y ago
    They may have been available for sale but people probably did not know about them. That itself takes most of the time. People need to learn about the product and understand how it can be used.
petra 10y ago
What changed ? maybe the fact that moore's law has stopped coupled with the rise of the cloud. And with the cloud, Google trends could be misleading - a small startup(with deep expertise) could deploy a service based on FPGA on the cloud, and have access to a very large market, possibly with people not even aware of the FPGA inside.

by jcbeard 10y ago

vertex-four 10y ago

FPGAs have been "all the rage" in a handful of fields for a reasonable amount of time. It just happens to be that most fields don't actually need FPGAs at all, and a CPU and maybe a GPU to go with it works just fine.

asimuvPR 10y ago

This won't directly answer your question but FPGA boards are now more accessible to hobbyists. That helps with popularity.

jcbeard 10y ago
not sure they haven't always been fairly accessible? I suppose prices are now dirt cheap vs. 2010/11 where I'd have to pay 300-400 for a mediocre FPGA (I've used digilent for years, prices on there have dropped quite fast in the last two years or so). then again, atmel had an FPGA co-processor for awhile at a relatively cheap price (can't remember the name...probably X28 with some characters), but still not really capable of running a neural network at any appreciable depth.
- asimuvPR 10y ago
  They may have been available for sale but people probably did not know about them. That itself takes most of the time. People need to learn about the product and understand how it can be used.

petra 10y ago

What changed ? maybe the fact that moore's law has stopped coupled with the rise of the cloud. And with the cloud, Google trends could be misleading - a small startup(with deep expertise) could deploy a service based on FPGA on the cloud, and have access to a very large market, possibly with people not even aware of the FPGA inside.