
FPGAs that speak your language - drallison
http://cerncourier.com/a/fpgas-that-speak-your-language/
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Traster
God I'm so tired of the same article over and over again. Firstly, if you want
to claim you can programme an FPGA with a high level language, you have to
exclude languages that are just syntactical sugar over hand coded RTL like
Maxeler does. Secondly, you don't get to wave your hands and go "Oh, the high
speed interfaces are done in RTL still" \- well yeah, because that's an actual
difficult performance problem and we know HLS can't do that.

You also have to answer why you're tackling why you're doing this work on an
FPGA at all. Yes, you can do ML on FPGA - mainly because the FPGA companies
are tripping over themselves to get some of that market. But that's offline
analysis, so there's absolutely no reason you can't do it on a GPU - which is
probably going to perform a hell of a lot better, let you iterate on a design
in minutes not hours, and uses real high level languages including actual ML
frameworks.

>Development time can be cut significantly, while maintaining latency and
resource usage at a similar level to hand-crafted FPGA code

Here's the key. I've seen development time cut by using HLS. I've seen HLS
designs with similar latency and resource usage as hand-crafted code. I've
never seen those two together. You either get designs that are orders of
magnitude worse than hand-crafted RTL but were quick to design. In which case,
ask yourself why you're shelling out for an FPGA when you probably could've
used a GPU. Or you do a first draft quickly, but to get to high performance
you end up basically fighting against the tool until you've forced it to
generate the RTL you could've written in half the time.

~~~
drallison
Traster expresses much angst, a love of GPUs, a dislike of FPGAs, and many
opinions, but provides no real data and much speculation. This is hardly an
serious evaluation of the FPGAs as an element of a high performance system.
(Full disclosure: I am an advisor to Maxeler.)

