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> But those UltraScale DSP48 units are competitive vs GPUs. Are they really competitive from a price / performance perspective? Based on my limited understandi

by NOGDP 6y ago

> But those UltraScale DSP48 units are competitive vs GPUs. Are they really competitive from a price / performance perspective? Based on my limited understanding, nvidia GPUs, for example, are several times cheaper for similar performance?

dragontamer 6y ago
Mass produced commodity processors will always win in price/performance. That's why x86 won, despite "more efficient" machines (Itanium, SPARC, DEC Alpha, PowerPC, etc. etc.) being developed. One of the few architectures to beat x86 in price/performance was ARM, because ARM aimed at even smaller and cheaper devices than even x86's ambitions. Ultimately, ARM "out-x86'd" the original x86 business strategy. ------------- GPUs managed to commoditize themselves thanks to the video game market. Most computers have a GPU in them today, if only for video games (iPhone, Snapdragon, normal PCs, and yes, game consoles). That's an opportunity for GPU-coders, as well as supercomputers who want a "2nd architecture" more suited for a 2nd set of compute problems. ----- FPGAs will probably never win in price / performance (unless some "commodity purpose" is discovered. I find that highly unlikely). Where FPGAs win is absolute performance, or performance/watt, in some hypothetical tasks that CPUs or GPUs don't do very well. (Ex: BTC Mining, or Deep Learning Systolic Arrays, or... whatever is invented later) Computers are so cheap, that even a $10,000 FPGA may save more electricity than an equivalent GPU, over the 3 year lifespan of their usage. Electricity costs of data-centers are pretty huge. The ultimate winner is of course, ASICs, a dedicated circuit for whatever you're trying to do. (Ex: Deep Blue's chess ASIC. Or Alexa's ASIC to interpret voice commands). But FPGAs serve as a stepping stone between CPUs and ASICs. ------ If you have a problem that's already served by a commodity processor, then absolutely use a standard computer! FPGAs are for people who have non-standard problems: weird data-movement, or compute so DENSE that all those cache-layers in the CPU (or GPU) just gets in the way.

by NOGDP 6y ago

dragontamer 6y ago

Mass produced commodity processors will always win in price/performance. That's why x86 won, despite "more efficient" machines (Itanium, SPARC, DEC Alpha, PowerPC, etc. etc.) being developed. One of the few architectures to beat x86 in price/performance was ARM, because ARM aimed at even smaller and cheaper devices than even x86's ambitions. Ultimately, ARM "out-x86'd" the original x86 business strategy. ------------- GPUs managed to commoditize themselves thanks to the video game market. Most computers have a GPU in them today, if only for video games (iPhone, Snapdragon, normal PCs, and yes, game consoles). That's an opportunity for GPU-coders, as well as supercomputers who want a "2nd architecture" more suited for a 2nd set of compute problems. ----- FPGAs will probably never win in price / performance (unless some "commodity purpose" is discovered. I find that highly unlikely). Where FPGAs win is absolute performance, or performance/watt, in some hypothetical tasks that CPUs or GPUs don't do very well. (Ex: BTC Mining, or Deep Learning Systolic Arrays, or... whatever is invented later) Computers are so cheap, that even a $10,000 FPGA may save more electricity than an equivalent GPU, over the 3 year lifespan of their usage. Electricity costs of data-centers are pretty huge. The ultimate winner is of course, ASICs, a dedicated circuit for whatever you're trying to do. (Ex: Deep Blue's chess ASIC. Or Alexa's ASIC to interpret voice commands). But FPGAs serve as a stepping stone between CPUs and ASICs. ------ If you have a problem that's already served by a commodity processor, then absolutely use a standard computer! FPGAs are for people who have non-standard problems: weird data-movement, or compute so DENSE that all those cache-layers in the CPU (or GPU) just gets in the way.