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Someone correct me if I'm out of line here, but I think it would be appropriate to mention your personal interest in FPGA's (which I discovered from your commen

Someone correct me if I'm out of line here, but I think it would be appropriate to mention your personal interest in FPGA's (which I discovered from your comments lower down). On the point itself, "accessibility" is probably understating the nature of the problem. Actually being able to program for a platform, and how easily you can do it, is a huge issue. Issues of "accessibility" apply as much to huge companies with giant server farms (note how little even GPU computing is used by them) as they do to tinkerers.

digitailor 13y ago
You're not out of line, and I haven't tried to hide the fact that I'm now professionally interested, in fact that's all I'm blabbing about below. But that's no coincidence- this is why I got into FPGAs: the problem spaces that are like what this cool project addresses. But I rejected GPUs as a platform completely for the reasons I list. And that's how I came to be interested in FPGAs. I am not an EE and it was a hard decision to make the switch to pursuing this, and I'm sharing that experience in the hope of inspiring/meeting others. As well as trying to open myself up to input/advice from people more experienced than I.
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  Fair point, as often happens I forgot to consider the possibility that your preference for FPGA's caused you to get a job selling an FPGA platform and not vice versa. In any case, my own viewpoint is that CUDA and OpenCL are the best that has been produced by a huge effort by well financed and technically sophisticated groups. GPU computing offers advantages in flops/watt and flops/dollar, and yet is still not widely utilized because of the increased programming complexity. Given this, I think it will be very hard for a small group to compete using a completely new architecture. On the other hand, you are starting with a blank slate and you are controlling the entire stack, so I hope you can use that to your advantage.

digitailor 13y ago

You're not out of line, and I haven't tried to hide the fact that I'm now professionally interested, in fact that's all I'm blabbing about below. But that's no coincidence- this is why I got into FPGAs: the problem spaces that are like what this cool project addresses. But I rejected GPUs as a platform completely for the reasons I list. And that's how I came to be interested in FPGAs. I am not an EE and it was a hard decision to make the switch to pursuing this, and I'm sharing that experience in the hope of inspiring/meeting others. As well as trying to open myself up to input/advice from people more experienced than I.

yetanotherphd 13y ago
Fair point, as often happens I forgot to consider the possibility that your preference for FPGA's caused you to get a job selling an FPGA platform and not vice versa. In any case, my own viewpoint is that CUDA and OpenCL are the best that has been produced by a huge effort by well financed and technically sophisticated groups. GPU computing offers advantages in flops/watt and flops/dollar, and yet is still not widely utilized because of the increased programming complexity. Given this, I think it will be very hard for a small group to compete using a completely new architecture. On the other hand, you are starting with a blank slate and you are controlling the entire stack, so I hope you can use that to your advantage.