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How do FPGAs compare on space and power? Would differences be enough to matter for mobile?
by imh 9y ago
How do FPGAs compare on space and power? Would differences be enough to matter for mobile?
- highd 9y agoI don't think space is an issue, but an ASIC designed exactly for a workload will always beat an FPGA on power. But if you don't know the workload exactly or don't have the money to fab an ASIC then an FPGA will be superior if the workload is a bad fit for CPUs or GPUs. So if you can save (2-10)x power on some unknown ML workload in the future that might be preferable to (10-20)x on some fixed workload with a fixed-point ASIC. I.e. Bitcoin mining went GPU->FPGA->ASIC, each with more investment required to design but higher overall performance in Hash/W. But that workload is known exactly.
- blackguardx 9y agoSpace is only an issue because it is directly correlated with unit cost.
- seanp2k2 9y agoI doubt they'll do an FPGA. Devices are too concerned with battery life to be running that, plus their margins would suffer or it'd be even more expensive.
- aswanson 9y agoProbably worse on power consumption as well as price per MIP.
- blackguardx 9y agoFPGAs are pretty bad space-wise and power-wise compared to straight up ASICs. Apple could make some blocks highly configurable, but even an FPGA designer wouldn't use FPGA fabric to do multiplication if they cared about performance. FPGAs are a mix of general purpose logic blocks (the fabric) and dedicated blocks like multipliers, dividers, PLLs, memory, serializers and deserializers, etc.
- highd 9y agoThat's what I'm thinking - some sort of configurable FPGA like fabric around a bulk of TPUv1 style cores, maybe for routing outputs around so you can do some nice pipe-lining like you might want with CV on video.