What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service

Re:What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service by mmaunder on Sunday December 11, 2016 @10:23PM (#13155257)

"Each FPGA contains approximately 2.5 million logic elements and approximately 6,800 Digital Signal Processing (DSP) engines."

Can an FPGA guru provide a real-world example of the kind of processing power this provides?

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Re:What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service by pjc50 on Monday December 12, 2016 @05:07AM (#13156975)

It's very difficult to relate to conventional CPUs because the model is so different; each of those DSP engines could be said to correspond to a lane in a SIMD instruction. However, they're usually set up for integer maths rather than floating point. So you could say that it's equivalent to 1,700 Pentiums running MMX instructions. But it's still limited to one or maybe two DRAM interfaces, so your data has to be very "local" and preferably streaming through the system to get that kind of throughput.

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Re:What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service by homero on Sunday December 11, 2016 @10:38PM (#13155317)

Just from experience. Bitcoin mining 10x from gpu to fpga so there's a lot of potential. But then again we aren't even using gpgpu in web apps.

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Re:What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service by nraynaud on Monday December 12, 2016 @04:25AM (#13156788)

I do :)

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