Technology

Huh. Everything I'm reading seems to imply it's more like a DSP ASIC than an FPGA (even down to the fact that it's a VLIW processor) but maybe that's wrong.

I'm curious what kind of work you do that's led you to this conclusion about FPGAs. I'm guessing you specifically use FPGAs for this task in your work? I'd love to hear about what kinds of ops you specifically find speedups in. I can imagine many exist, as otherwise there wouldn't be a need for features like tensor cores and transformer acceleration on the latest NVIDIA GPUs (since obviously these features must exploit some inefficiency in GPGPU architectures, up to limits in memory bandwidth of course), but also I wonder how much benefit you can get since in practice a lot of features end up limited by memory bandwidth, and unless you have a gigantic FPGA I imagine this is going to be an issue there as well.

I haven't seriously touched FPGAs in a while, but I work in ML research (namely CV) and I don't know anyone on the research side bothering with FPGAs. Even dedicated accelerators are still mostly niche products because in practice, the software suite needed to run them takes a lot more time to configure. For us on the academic side, you're usually looking at experiments that take a day or a few to run at most. If you're now spending an extra day or two writing RTL instead of just slapping together a few lines of python that implicitly calls CUDA kernels, you're not really benefiting from the potential speedup of FPGAs. On the other hand, I know accelerators are handy for production environments (and in general they're more popular for inference than training).

I suspect it's much easier to find someone who can write quality CUDA or PTX than someone who can write quality RTL, especially with CS being much more popular than ECE nowadays. At a minimum, the whole FPGA skillset seems much less common among my peers. Maybe it'll be more crucial in the future (which will definitely be interesting!) but it's not something I've seen yet.

Looking forward to hearing your perspective!