That was an interesting read, an Adrian has done a lot of interesting work, but I can't agree with the theme that FPGAs are just another compute engine with a w

That was an interesting read, an Adrian has done a lot of interesting work, but I can't agree with the theme that FPGAs are just another compute engine with a wonky ISA. I've met a number of software people who are now developing FPGA designs, and hardware people who are the same place (even looking to hire US Persons with those skills for SDR work :-) and invariably the software folks get a brain cramp because it "looks" like code, but it doesn't "work" like code. I have often wondered how close this experience is to English speaking people listening to a conversation about a software design and implementation becoming frustrated because they think they understand each word but they aren't understanding any semantics of the conversation. I'm one of those people who essentially double majored in EE and CS[1] which is sort of like growing up in a house where one parent speaks one language and the other speaks another. In those situations you tend to naturally accept when one discipline (or language) doesn't overlap cleanly with the other. As a result I disagree with the author that an FPGA is just a computation engine with a "wonky" ISA. Thinking about it that way is some what limiting. That said, some of the things that give FPGAs their programmability might be useful additions to GPUS, mostly redefining the internal data paths of the GPU to allocate more "bits" to change dynamic range for different operators might allow some interesting things to be done. HDLs themselves are interesting problems, because you have a target, switching matrix and logic elements of an FPGA, and text. Designing a way to express the capabilities in one that translates to the other is very hard. So hard in fact that there are circuits you can construct in the FPGA that you cannot express directly in a HDL, and there are things you can write in an HDL that cannot by synthesized into a set of linked logic elements and a clock. On the surface this might seem like saying "Well yeah you can write things in assembly that the compiler won't generate." but it goes deeper than that. Both from programming what the pins on the package do to changing clock networks to get timing closures on complex designs, an FPGA is not a stored program computation device unless you configure it as one. [1] Computer Engineering as a major wasn't a "thing" yet so I ended up taking all the EE major classes and nearly all the CS major classes (I missed out on some of the logic oriented math classes of CS because of the physics and materials science requirements on the EE side).