Re:Open Source Needs FPGAs; FPGAs Need an On-Ramp
by lvoudour on Friday March 31, 2017 @06:55PM
(#14009117)
Designing an ASIC with low power in mind will always beat an FPGA, no question there. But the design cost is prohibitive for many applications (not to mention the lack of flexibility to re-iterate/patch your design with little to no cost). But compared to GPUs I'm fairly certain you can do much better power-wise going with an FPGA.
You have finer control over your frequency, over which sections to power down, how often to switch, etc.
Of course you can get better price/GFLOP with GPUs + quicker time to market
Re:Open Source Needs FPGAs; FPGAs Need an On-Ramp
by thesz on Friday March 31, 2017 @07:05PM
(#14009193)
And yet they (GPUs) aren't (better for FLOP/watt than FPGA) everywhere.
GPUs have very particular cache and computation hierarchy which is not necessarily a best/good fit for all problems that are being thrown at them.
On the DSP side, you're using a ASIC DSP(can't change the width for instance) anyway on most modern FPGAs so you're comparing ASIC to ASIC at that point.