
Inferring the Future of FPGAs - Katydid
https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/10/02/inferring-the-future-of-the-fpga-and-then-making-it/
======
guiriduro
I think you can find more mundane but much more widely applicable uses for
FPGA fabric in future, especially if we start shipping them in most ARM CPUs.
For example, you can compress and decompress memory pages in real-time, which
(for streaming applications at least) is one way to increase RAM bandwidth, or
reduce system cost. Or hyper-optimize grep, sed and awk, and a hardware-
assisted bitonic sort library for your DB. Cheaper, faster, lower-power
compute for everyone.

------
baybal2
I don't think that needs for running neural networks will emerge in
datacentres. The demand is too low.

Nor is the FPGA the best thing to run them on. Even if you "bake" them into
static integer models, that can be mapped directly to gates, that only
possible for the smallest ones around. GPUs are pretty much what is the best
as it is: an accelerator for doing a lot of low precision linear algebra.

And as a side benefit, you can play Quake on all those GTXes pressed into
linear algebra crunching in datacentres. Jokes aside, being able to resell
server hardware later on is a very good thing. Moreover, the sole fact that
gaming industry is magnitude bigger than whatever happens in HPC will be the
guarantor of (relatively) low prices.

~~~
p1esk
FPGAs are much better than current GPUs for low precision NN computation
(binary or ternary). Nvidia knows that (that's why they introduced
experimental INT1 mode on their latest cards).

------
escherplex
Anyone recommend good non-vendor GUIs for experimenting with FPGAs on your
own?

~~~
rjsw
You can use verilator to simulate a design.

------
glenrivard
I am not yet convinced we will see tons of FPGAs. They are less power
efficient than ASICs.

Yes ASICs cost a lot more up front. But as the companies get bigger and bigger
they can afford that up front cost.

The cost of making an ASIC has already dropped and would expect that to
continue to happen.

Plus we have the issue of needing to integrate memory with computation to
lower power use of moving around data and that is a even harder to do on a
FPGA then an ASIC.

~~~
technomalogical
FPGA still has some advantages over ASIC development:

\- development speed of FPGA over the typical ASIC lifecycle is much shorter

\- the ability to field-program and correct a design flaw can not only save
expensive iterations, but also to add new hardware features essentially as a
"firmware" upgrade (provided the FPGA in the system has extra capacity)

There will always be a place for ASIC, but FPGAs provide some capabilities
that are not available (impossible?) for ASIC.

------
ispiansclsda
It is interesting that one can write code (for which certain
computational/logic structures are automatically inferred) describing hardware
to run inference models, while inferring that such a piece of computing power
will be useful to infer the future.

