Re:Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Com...
by janoc on Thursday August 23, 2018 @02:23PM
(#17829516)
That's nonsense. PCI/PCIe FPGA accelerator boards have been around for ages, mostly used by the finance traders and for machine learning/math-intensive computations before cheap GPUs with much simpler programming models (no need to write e.g. matrix multiplication in VHDL/Verilog anymore) like the various programmable shaders, CUDA and OpenCL have pretty much relegated them into obscurity.
FPGA is great if you need to talk to some hardware very fast/on many pins. E.g. something like a network router where you are shuffling packets between many high speed interfaces. Or doing a lot of measurements/interfacing a bunch of high speed sensors.
But not for general purpose software - GPUs are both faster, easier to develop for (and with good tooling) and much cheaper for doing that today.
FPGA is great if you need to talk to some hardware very fast/on many pins. E.g. something like a network router where you are shuffling packets between many high speed interfaces. Or doing a lot of measurements/interfacing a bunch of high speed sensors.
But not for general purpose software - GPUs are both faster, easier to develop for (and with good tooling) and much cheaper for doing that today.