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A comment on Open Source Needs FPGAs; FPGAs Need an On-Ramp. Parent comment

Re:Open Source Needs FPGAs; FPGAs Need an On-Ramp by thesz on Friday March 31, 2017 @06:52PM (#14009100)
The processes used for FPGA are VERY competitive with GPUs. Stratix 10 is at 14nm, for example. Stratix V was built using 28 nm process and that was at least 5 years ago - on par or exceed NVidia.

You can fuse more operations into DSP using FPGA and/or you can perform less operations per FLOP. One example is to avoid rounding and packing/unpacking when creating deep pipelines for floating point processes.

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Re:Open Source Needs FPGAs; FPGAs Need an On-Ramp by vvanders on Saturday April 01, 2017 @12:30AM (#14010432)
Cheapest Stratix V I can find on digikey starts at ~$1,800 and quickly goes up to $10k for the bare chip in quantities of 24.

For open source hardware I doubt you'll see people shell out the cost of a used car to be able to match modern ~$200 GPUs.

I don't even what to know what Stratix 10 starts at.

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Re:Open Source Needs FPGAs; FPGAs Need an On-Ramp by thesz on Saturday April 01, 2017 @12:01PM (#14012714)
The complete devkit solution is about $7K - https://www.altera.com/products/boards_and_kits/dev-kits/alt...

The Xeon Phi board https://www.cnet.com/products/intel-xeon-phi-coprocessor-712... is $4.2K..$5K

The Stratix V board will not consume more than 60W when used as PCI Express card. The requirements for Xeon Phi is at least 250W.

With a difference of ~200W, there will be difference in ~4.5kW/h per day or ~1600kW/h or $160 in hard cash per year (US average). Very probably more - getting rid of heat produced, etc.

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Re:Open Source Needs FPGAs; FPGAs Need an On-Ramp by throwayedidqo on Saturday April 01, 2017 @03:50AM (#14011070)
Wow. These things just scream military use. My guess is phased array radar.
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Re:Open Source Needs FPGAs; FPGAs Need an On-Ramp by leoedin on Saturday April 01, 2017 @05:17AM (#14011311)
I worked on a space based imaging radar which used an FPGA. It cost mid 6 figures per chip...

This was admittedly a space certified radiation hardened chip. Still alarming when you had to pick it up and carry it somewhere

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