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This is completely incorrect. There are many serial applications that run significantly faster in an fpga even at one-fifth of the clock of a CPU. The reason be
by shaklee3 7y ago
This is completely incorrect. There are many serial applications that run significantly faster in an fpga even at one-fifth of the clock of a CPU. The reason being that you can dedicate all of the resources to performing that one task instead of sharing it and using instructions that are not optimized for it. There is a reason signal processing is still predominantly done in asics, fpgas, and DSPs.
- ohyes 7y agoI think you misunderstood. I said very little about the relative performance. I know quite well that the FPGA can be faster. The point is you have to work 10-50x as hard to get there, if you want to do anything interesting. Arbitrary FPGA application code is not a thing. Practically speaking, by the time in your development cycle that you’ve built your custom hardware and software, got it through emissions and are ready to sell it commercially, there’s a new intel chip that is competitive with what you’re doing, using C code. (It’s an FPGA so you have to deliver custom hardware with it). FPGAs have advanced as well in this time, but you’re not using that, you’re using a 2-4 year old one. We were picking apart tcp packets and processing the data inside of them. What we built worked, and it was faster than a CPU, but we had a lot of clever non-standard custom compilers to do it. It was really fun, challenging and interesting work, but really hard to justify in a practical sense. Things like signal processing are a good application mostly because they’re well understood and the code follows the same basic pattern. Novel applications are much more difficult.