Re:How Does an FPGA Work?
by PragmaticPulp on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @03:04PM
(#35806365)
> 1. why don't we have more user-programmable FPGAs in our fancy desktop mainboards
It has been tried, but GPUs are so fast and efficient enough that it’s rarely worth it.
It’s very easy to attach an FPGA to the PCIe bus as an add-in card exactly like your GPU. In fact, many FPGA dev boards come in exactly this format. They’re available, they’re just not in demand.
> 2. is there a SoC board, ARM or RISC-V based, with an FPGA on board? The slower the CPU, the more useful an FPGA would be to accelerate compute tasks
Plenty of FPGA parts include ARM cores. It’s a fairly standard chip configuration.
You can also connect an FPGA and an SoC with PCIe or other interconnects. It’s really not an obstacle.
FPGAs just aren’t very efficient from a cost or dev time perspective for most applications. They’re indispensable when you need them, though.
It has been tried, but GPUs are so fast and efficient enough that it’s rarely worth it.
It’s very easy to attach an FPGA to the PCIe bus as an add-in card exactly like your GPU. In fact, many FPGA dev boards come in exactly this format. They’re available, they’re just not in demand.
> 2. is there a SoC board, ARM or RISC-V based, with an FPGA on board? The slower the CPU, the more useful an FPGA would be to accelerate compute tasks
Plenty of FPGA parts include ARM cores. It’s a fairly standard chip configuration.
You can also connect an FPGA and an SoC with PCIe or other interconnects. It’s really not an obstacle.
FPGAs just aren’t very efficient from a cost or dev time perspective for most applications. They’re indispensable when you need them, though.