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A comment on Actel rolls mixed-signal FPGA with hard ARM core. Parent comment

Re:Actel rolls mixed-signal FPGA with hard ARM core by rcbuse on Tuesday March 02, 2010 @08:33AM (#1161296)
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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Re:Actel rolls mixed-signal FPGA with hard ARM core by andrewcooke on Tuesday March 02, 2010 @08:42AM (#1161309)
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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Re:Actel rolls mixed-signal FPGA with hard ARM core by aswanson on Tuesday March 02, 2010 @09:35AM (#1161426)
You would need to do on the fly reprogramming which is slow. The game designer would have to be intimately familiar w the fpga architecture and the game software complexity would increase ridiculously. Fpga density cannot rival dedicated gpu gate density for dedicated rasterizing, etc. I doubt performance would improve at all. Game computations are dominated by what gpus are built for.
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Re:Actel rolls mixed-signal FPGA with hard ARM core by coffee_bender on Tuesday March 02, 2010 @09:13AM (#1161379)
I should also note that an FPGA will not perform as well as a custom ASIC (such as a GPU) in terms of speed, power, or price (in significantly large quantities). An FPGA can be a very good options for moderate to low volume applications. You are correct with your description of a potential FPGA application. I would say it could rival or exceed the performance of the GPU solution.
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Re:Actel rolls mixed-signal FPGA with hard ARM core by rcbuse on Tuesday March 02, 2010 @08:57AM (#1161349)
Well, I should say, it won't rival a dedicated GPU once you factor in cost.
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Re:Actel rolls mixed-signal FPGA with hard ARM core by andrewcooke on Tuesday March 02, 2010 @09:05AM (#1161360)
ah, ok. thanks.
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