

Actel rolls mixed-signal FPGA with hard ARM core - daeken
http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223101108

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andrewcooke
With all the fuss about GPUs, FPGAs seem to be less fashionable. I vaguely
remember when they were going to be "the future" - that now seems to what
GPU/CPU fusion will give us instead.

But I know nothing about FPGAs. Why don't we currently have CPUs that are
reprogrammable (ie in laptops and destops)? Why don't we have (popular) FPGA
based accelerators like we have graphics cards? Why aren't FPGAs used in
graphics cards so that they can be customized for each game?

Some of my work involves numerical computing, working with GPUs/OpenCL/CUDA -
yet I've never really considered FPGAs. Can they be configured to do matrix
maths? Is the problem that they have limited storage?

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rcbuse
FPGAs are general purpose logic gates that you can reprogram on the fly to do
whatever you want them to do. I suppose you could configure them to do matrix
maths, but they are not going to rival a dedicated GPU. Most hardware that
utilizes a FPGA does so to simplify circut design, allow for circut redesign
after a board has been built, and to cut down the number of external logic
parts needed.

A CPU / GPU also has many orders of magnitude more logic gates than an FPGA
has.

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andrewcooke
i think I understand that, but I don't understand why it won't rival a
dedicated GPU. A GPU is very much restricted to be SIMD, while it seems to me
that you could program an FPGA in response to the data - either many SIMD
processors or a a few SIMD plus some logic that combines results, or ...

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rcbuse
Well, I should say, it won't rival a dedicated GPU once you factor in cost.

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andrewcooke
ah, ok. thanks.

