4 ms·
Last time I checked, GPU processing has a better-bang-for-the-buck than FPGA processing, and the gap continues to widen.
by windll 16y ago
Last time I checked, GPU processing has a better-bang-for-the-buck than FPGA processing, and the gap continues to widen.
- nl 16y agoI suspect the NSA doesn't care too much about bang-for-buck. 22nm FPGA's [1] seem like they would work pretty well. In an interesting twist, The Register claims that Achronix's decision to use Intel was driven in part by national security considerations. We've reported extensively on the idea that chips fabbed overseas in insecure facilities could contain hidden kill switches or backdoors that would let an opponent cripple the US military, and Achronix allegedly wants to be able to sweeten its pitch to military customers by offering a home-grown solution. [1] http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/11/intel-shifts-strategy-sells-22nm-fab-capacity.ars http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/11/intel-shifts-st...
- pjscott 16y agoThose are particularly interesting because they're asynchronous FPGAs -- they use local handshaking rather than a global clock to keep everything synchronized. That should make them easier to port to new, smaller process nodes, and they say it's responsible for their unusually high throughput. Cool stuff, and all the more intriguing considering that Intel's getting involved.
- orborde 16y agoI suspect the NSA doesn't care too much about bang-for-buck. Bang-for-buck is pretty much the name of the game in brute-force cracking. You're right that NSA probably doesn't have any budget constraints, but they'd still be interested in getting the most hashes/second possible out of $10 million.
- mducia 16y agoWorld's fastest supercomputer is now nvidia's gpus: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/china-builds-worlds-fastest-supercomputer http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/china-...