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> It's one of those things that seem like a good idea, but they just don't work out in practice. GPGPU sucks a lot of air out of the room as well. There aren't
by duskwuff 3y ago
> It's one of those things that seem like a good idea, but they just don't work out in practice.
GPGPU sucks a lot of air out of the room as well. There aren't many purely computational problems which FPGAs can solve better than a compute-optimized GPU; even though GPUs aren't quite as flexible, they clock a lot faster, they're cheaper, and they're easier to develop for.
- rowanG077 3y agoI actually think there are a ton of problems which could benefit. But there is just very little mindshare. You basically have 1000x the people working on building software to run efficiently on the GPU. No way FPGA touches that. In addition it's a specialized set of skills to build high performance circuits. Whereas running on a GPU is "just" software. So even though I think FPGA could win out from an efficiency perspective for some problems there is just not enough people/companies working on it to win out. It also doesn't help the tools are raging proprietary garbage fires.
- ethbr1 3y agoThat's been a historically really good bet for processor architectures -- developer volume beats hypothetical performance. Essentially the only time it's gone the other way was when there was a toehold in a critical market, where the benefits were so obvious and profitable that they made up for the difficulty (e.g. graphics).