What are FPGAs generally used for, or when are they preferred over an ASIC or GPU?
bwf
Field Programmable Gate Arrays are used in a variety of fields(robotics, graphics, audio processing). FPGAs are able to achieve great performance in the tasks that they are assigned to do because they are designed specifically to do that task and as a result can do it quickly because they are optimized for specific operations.
kayvonf
@mangocourage. It's a very good question, and not one that the field has a great answer for yet. You might be interested in the paper I linked to on slide 23.
parallelfifths
@mangocourage, I'm certainly not an expert and would appreciate input from someone who is, but I was always under the impression that main draw of FPGAs was their reprogrammability. That is, if you're someone who wants to keep playing with your hardware in order to have it efficiently do different, highly specialized specialized computations over the course of owning it, you'd want an FPGA. This article is two years old, but it does an ok job at basic compare and contrast of ASIC vs. FPGA. It also brings up the interesting point that FPGAs are very useful to ASIC designers because the reprogrammability of FPGAs makes them well-suited for rapid ASIC prototyping.
What are FPGAs generally used for, or when are they preferred over an ASIC or GPU?
Field Programmable Gate Arrays are used in a variety of fields(robotics, graphics, audio processing). FPGAs are able to achieve great performance in the tasks that they are assigned to do because they are designed specifically to do that task and as a result can do it quickly because they are optimized for specific operations.
@mangocourage. It's a very good question, and not one that the field has a great answer for yet. You might be interested in the paper I linked to on slide 23.
@mangocourage, I'm certainly not an expert and would appreciate input from someone who is, but I was always under the impression that main draw of FPGAs was their reprogrammability. That is, if you're someone who wants to keep playing with your hardware in order to have it efficiently do different, highly specialized specialized computations over the course of owning it, you'd want an FPGA. This article is two years old, but it does an ok job at basic compare and contrast of ASIC vs. FPGA. It also brings up the interesting point that FPGAs are very useful to ASIC designers because the reprogrammability of FPGAs makes them well-suited for rapid ASIC prototyping.