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That depends what you mean by mainstream. These days the cloud data centre is a mainstream market for hardware vendors. In that environment FPGAs can make sense

That depends what you mean by mainstream. These days the cloud data centre is a mainstream market for hardware vendors. In that environment FPGAs can make sense. They might have advantages in throughput, latency, power consumption, security (no spectre), reliability (no software updates). For example, Microsoft use them for Azure virtual networking, machine learning and something inside Bing. You can imagine a world where every blade server has an FPGA. In fact, you can imagine a world where many blade servers have an FPGA and only a small support CPU.

jdietrich 8y ago
You can spin up an FPGA-accelerated EC2 instance right now. There are a few highly specialised applications where every scrap of performance matters, but for the most part the software development costs are prohibitive compared to just spinning up more CPU or GPU instances. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/
- snaky 8y ago
  There are some interesting ideas about programmability, like automagically offloading some computation parts to FPGA. http://conal.net/blog/posts/haskell-to-hardware-via-cccs http://conal.net/blog/posts/haskell-to-hardware-via-cccs http://conal.net/blog/posts/circuits-as-a-bicartesian-closed-category http://conal.net/blog/posts/circuits-as-a-bicartesian-closed... https://github.com/conal/lambda-ccc/blob/master/doc/notes.md https://github.com/conal/lambda-ccc/blob/master/doc/notes.md
  - Filligree 8y ago
    The software needed to drive them needs to become much better (documented, ergonomics, everything) before that will be a realistic option.
phkahler 8y ago
As far as know there are zero applications on the client or desktop side that can take advantage of FPGA.
- abainbridge 8y ago
  There's this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/machine-learning/service/concept-accelerate-with-fpgas https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/machine-learning/serv...

jdietrich 8y ago

You can spin up an FPGA-accelerated EC2 instance right now. There are a few highly specialised applications where every scrap of performance matters, but for the most part the software development costs are prohibitive compared to just spinning up more CPU or GPU instances. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/

snaky 8y ago
There are some interesting ideas about programmability, like automagically offloading some computation parts to FPGA. http://conal.net/blog/posts/haskell-to-hardware-via-cccs http://conal.net/blog/posts/haskell-to-hardware-via-cccs http://conal.net/blog/posts/circuits-as-a-bicartesian-closed-category http://conal.net/blog/posts/circuits-as-a-bicartesian-closed... https://github.com/conal/lambda-ccc/blob/master/doc/notes.md https://github.com/conal/lambda-ccc/blob/master/doc/notes.md
- Filligree 8y ago
  The software needed to drive them needs to become much better (documented, ergonomics, everything) before that will be a realistic option.

phkahler 8y ago

As far as know there are zero applications on the client or desktop side that can take advantage of FPGA.

abainbridge 8y ago
There's this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/machine-learning/service/concept-accelerate-with-fpgas https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/machine-learning/serv...