News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Com... by abainbridge on Thursday August 23, 2018 @05:23AM (#17825795)
That depends what you mean by mainstream. These days the cloud data centre is a mainstream market for hardware vendors. In that environment FPGAs can make sense. They might have advantages in throughput, latency, power consumption, security (no spectre), reliability (no software updates). For example, Microsoft use them for Azure virtual networking, machine learning and something inside Bing. You can imagine a world where every blade server has an FPGA. In fact, you can imagine a world where many blade servers have an FPGA and only a small support CPU.
Re:Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Com... by jdietrich on Thursday August 23, 2018 @05:34AM (#17825844)
You can spin up an FPGA-accelerated EC2 instance right now. There are a few highly specialised applications where every scrap of performance matters, but for the most part the software development costs are prohibitive compared to just spinning up more CPU or GPU instances.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/

Re:Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Com... by snaky on Thursday August 23, 2018 @06:26AM (#17826044)
Re:Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Com... by Filligree on Thursday August 23, 2018 @12:34PM (#17828615)
The software needed to drive them needs to become much better (documented, ergonomics, everything) before that will be a realistic option.
Re:Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Com... by phkahler on Thursday August 23, 2018 @08:56AM (#17826826)
As far as know there are zero applications on the client or desktop side that can take advantage of FPGA.
Re:Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Com... by abainbridge on Friday August 24, 2018 @12:18PM (#17835862)