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> FPGAs will never rival gpus or TPUs for inference. The main reason is that GPUs aren't really gpus anymore. Yeah. Even for Bitcoin mining GPUs dominated FPG
by fpgaminer 9mo ago
> FPGAs will never rival gpus or TPUs for inference. The main reason is that GPUs aren't really gpus anymore.
Yeah. Even for Bitcoin mining GPUs dominated FPGAs. I created the Bitcoin mining FPGA project(s), and they were only interesting for two reasons: 1) they were far more power efficient, which in the case of mining changes the equation significantly. 2) GPUs at the time had poor binary math support, which hampered their performance; whereas an FPGA is just one giant binary math machine.
- beeflet 9mo agoI have wondered if it is possible to make a mining algorithm FPGA-hard in the same way that RandomX is CPU-hard and memory-hard. Relative to CPUs, the "programming time" cost is high. Nice username btw.
- hayley-patton 9mo agoMy recollection is that ASIC-resistance involves using lots of scratchpad memory and mixing multiple hashing algorithms, so that you'd have to use a lot of silicon and/or bottleneck hard on external RAM. I think the same would hurt FPGAs too.
- ksk23 9mo agoImho, not knowing too much bout both concepts; it kinda is! You would need to re-implement a general purpose cpu to beat it, or that was the idea behind RandomX