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> "FPGAs are efficient" Where do you get that idea? FPGAs have extremely poor efficiency compared to purpose-built designs. They are only a option where no e
by ThrowawayR2 5y ago
> "FPGAs are efficient"
Where do you get that idea? FPGAs have extremely poor efficiency compared to purpose-built designs. They are only a option where no existing purpose-built design (whether CPU, DSP, etc.) fits the problem you have well enough to be practical and creating a fully custom purpose-built chip doesn't fit in the budget.
A more realistic version of that approach were mask-programmable gate arrays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_array https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_array) but even those aren't efficient enough to overcome the advantage of purpose-built chips.
- cariboulabs 5y agopower efficiency was proven to be in the same orders of magnitude as MPU / GPU. see e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.11879.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.11879.pdf. The ability to mutate its firmware gives another crucial edge. And my point is that FPGAs have evolved is small paces until today. While dedicated silicon has been optimized to the bones. Given the same dedication of companies to FPGAs - isn't it going to evolve into a better, cheaper device? More interesting info: see RiscV soft cores, SDRs, MCUs with internal logic fabric.
- ThrowawayR2 5y agoThat paper is exactly the kind of thing I mean when I said "no existing purpose-built design fits the problem you have well enough to be practical" A custom built vision processor for the algoritm they're using would outperform all of the solutions in the paper by at least an order of magnitude. Just because FPGA solves a single, very specialized type of problem well doesn't mean that it solves every type of problem well.