Re:How to accelerate a program using hardware
by officialchicken on Thursday December 17, 2015 @10:36PM
(#10756451)
Faster, potentially cheaper, and more expensive to produce?
The history of the bitcoin miner has details and us a real-world example of software on x86 ASIC -> FPGA -> Custom ASIC process. It's easy to find the relative performance of the bitcoin miner running on everything from Rasberry PI's to CUDA clusters [1].
Note that the article is using the very flexible DE2-115 and there's lots of interesting trade-offs made to fit a bitcoin miner in only 115,000 gates... iirc, if you have 250k gates, it can run 4x (???) faster due to optimizations during synthesis.
The history of the bitcoin miner has details and us a real-world example of software on x86 ASIC -> FPGA -> Custom ASIC process. It's easy to find the relative performance of the bitcoin miner running on everything from Rasberry PI's to CUDA clusters [1].
Note that the article is using the very flexible DE2-115 and there's lots of interesting trade-offs made to fit a bitcoin miner in only 115,000 gates... iirc, if you have 250k gates, it can run 4x (???) faster due to optimizations during synthesis.
https://github.com/progranism/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner
Current Performance: 109 MHash/s On a Terasic DE2-115 Development Board [2]
[1] https://github.com/progranism/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner
[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparis...