Re:Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip
by p1esk on Tuesday September 27, 2016 @04:17PM
(#12592754)
Thanks, but TK1 is using FP32 weights, as opposed to FP16 on FPGA. If you double the GOP/s number for TK1 to account for that, you will end up with pretty much identical performance, and the paper claims they both consume ~9W.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that to make a convincing claim that FPGAs are more power efficient than GPUs, one needs to do an apples to apples comparison.
And of course, let's not forget about price: Zynq ZC706 board is what, over $6k? And Jetson TK1 was what when released, $300? If you need to deploy a thousand of these chips in your datacenter, to save a million per year on power, you will need several years to break even, and by that time, you will probably need to upgrade.
It just seems that GPUs are a better deal currently, with or without looking at power efficiency.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that to make a convincing claim that FPGAs are more power efficient than GPUs, one needs to do an apples to apples comparison.
And of course, let's not forget about price: Zynq ZC706 board is what, over $6k? And Jetson TK1 was what when released, $300? If you need to deploy a thousand of these chips in your datacenter, to save a million per year on power, you will need several years to break even, and by that time, you will probably need to upgrade.
It just seems that GPUs are a better deal currently, with or without looking at power efficiency.