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FPGAs will never be mainstream for replacing CPUs or GPUs: the performance overhead of an FPGA compared to dedicated silicon is huge and not going down, regardl

FPGAs will never be mainstream for replacing CPUs or GPUs: the performance overhead of an FPGA compared to dedicated silicon is huge and not going down, regardless of how open or closed they are. FPGAs have their uses in niches, but I don't think they'll ever be something the average user has in their device, and certainly they won't be the only thing in there. Anyone wishing to disrupt the way mainstream compute is done will need to make silicon, and competitive silicon (thankfully, this is more accessable than it ever has been thanks to the fabs no longer being vertically integrated with chip design companies, but it's still a very large barrier to entry). Someone with the resources to do it making a 100,000 core machine would be interesting, but I doubt the results will be very good (see greenarrays). similarly, genetic algorithms are not actually very good. The only advantage of them is they can kinda work for a wide variety of wonky problems, but there's almost always a better option, usually one which is way better than a GA.

loup-vaillant 3y ago
The point of FPGA is not to make competitive CPUs. It’s to _prototype_ them. Give wide access to that, and more people will be able to design cores, and experiment with different design trade-offs, or even computing models. Granted, a softcore on FPGA is at high volumes much more expensive and much less capable than a corresponding ASIC. At low volumes however it’s the only affordable alternative, and that’s make them the gateway to hardware design by the people (and increasingly, for the people as well). By the way I recently purchased a Tillitis key¹, a security dongle with a RISC-V soft core (PicoRV32) running on the iCE40 Ultra Plus FPGA. I absolutely love their approach, where you can run arbitrary programs on that key, and each program gets an independent secret seed (derived from the key’s secret and a hash of the program). Sure this FPGA soft core is much less powerful than an equivalently priced hard core would have been, but I’m not sure they could have done such an open design without it. Especially the upcoming unlocked version, which will allow customers to customise the "hardware" itself. I personally can’t wait, I’d like to experiment a couple optimisations. [1]: https://tillitis.se/ https://tillitis.se/

loup-vaillant 3y ago

The point of FPGA is not to make competitive CPUs. It’s to _prototype_ them. Give wide access to that, and more people will be able to design cores, and experiment with different design trade-offs, or even computing models. Granted, a softcore on FPGA is at high volumes much more expensive and much less capable than a corresponding ASIC. At low volumes however it’s the only affordable alternative, and that’s make them the gateway to hardware design by the people (and increasingly, for the people as well). By the way I recently purchased a Tillitis key¹, a security dongle with a RISC-V soft core (PicoRV32) running on the iCE40 Ultra Plus FPGA. I absolutely love their approach, where you can run arbitrary programs on that key, and each program gets an independent secret seed (derived from the key’s secret and a hash of the program). Sure this FPGA soft core is much less powerful than an equivalently priced hard core would have been, but I’m not sure they could have done such an open design without it. Especially the upcoming unlocked version, which will allow customers to customise the "hardware" itself. I personally can’t wait, I’d like to experiment a couple optimisations. [1]: https://tillitis.se/ https://tillitis.se/