http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/22/university-of-edinburgh-crafts-energy-efficient-fpga-supercomput/ Engadget Comments for http://www.engadget.com/media/feedlogo.gif http://www.engadget.com en-us Copyright 2012 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/22/university-of-edinburgh-crafts-energy-efficient-fpga-supercomput/http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/22/university-of-edinburgh-crafts-energy-efficient-fpga-supercomput/Mar 22nd 2007 5:17AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2007/03/22/university-of-edinburgh-crafts-energy-efficient-fpga-supercomput/http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/22/university-of-edinburgh-crafts-energy-efficient-fpga-supercomput/
I think you mean "hopping."

/nitpick]]>Mar 22nd 2007 9:52AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2007/03/22/university-of-edinburgh-crafts-energy-efficient-fpga-supercomput/http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/22/university-of-edinburgh-crafts-energy-efficient-fpga-supercomput/
I think you mean "hopping."

/nitpick]]>Mar 22nd 2007 9:52AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2007/03/22/university-of-edinburgh-crafts-energy-efficient-fpga-supercomput/http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/22/university-of-edinburgh-crafts-energy-efficient-fpga-supercomput/
Anyhow the real problem here is that this is all a joke. You can not compare an FPGA to a CPU for several reasons. The biggest of which is that no one would design an FPGA to be able to handle the HUGE instruction set of a CPU. Now if you wanted to design an FPGA to work in conjuction with a CPU to speed up FEAR, WOW, or whatever game then it might be usefull. Actually some company is planning on doing this with the AMD architecure that shares the hypertransport bus.

Basically FPGAs can be extremely efficient because you can design them to work in parrell, becuase you are not confined by the x86 instruction set. For all those folding@home projects you could design an FPGA to do all the FFTs 100s of times faster than any CPU.]]>Mar 22nd 2007 12:56PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2007/03/22/university-of-edinburgh-crafts-energy-efficient-fpga-supercomput/http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/22/university-of-edinburgh-crafts-energy-efficient-fpga-supercomput/Mar 23rd 2007 7:54AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2007/03/22/university-of-edinburgh-crafts-energy-efficient-fpga-supercomput/http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/22/university-of-edinburgh-crafts-energy-efficient-fpga-supercomput/I have to agree with most of the previous comments. FPGAs can ery difficuilt to program and i too would be worried about the tasks this device can actually implement.

"FPGAs use power like it is going out of style normally." as far as this goes have you ever compared it to the power consumption of a processor and all the memory components and busses need to make this operate?

"no one would design an FPGA to be able to handle the HUGE instruction set of a CPU" as far as this is concerned i am not really sure what you are talking about.. the instruction set is relatively small and a FPGA can be programmed to carry out far more complex tasks in a single instruction cycle than a processor ever could and with the use of run-time reconfiguration the FPGA can be made to operate in a similar way to a processor but implement custom instructions with the speed of hardware.

I agree that the power consumption of FPGA's makes them impractical for most applications but they do provide an interesting way of bridging the gap between "efficient" hardware and "flexible" software.

G

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