You need a deployment scenario where FPGAs beat GPUs (and CPUs) by enough to be worth that pain, but not by enough that someone already has a ready-made ASIC for you. I agree that one would expect to see more deployment of FPGA's naively, but not a lot.
SDN is common, and definitely a scenario where FPGAs outperform GPUs. Same for machine learning. (FWIW, Google uses ASICs for both of these use cases.) What we need is a high level language and access to FPGAs. I've been interested in business opportunities in this area, but it's hard to monetize. What's somewhat surprising is that the language bit hasn't been solved in the open source world either. My suspicion is that the reason an open source language like Flow Tables doesn't exist (AFAIK) is that there's not widespread access to FPGAs.
It's that I have no idea where to even buy a reasonable FPGA card with a high-speed interconnect so I could build my own Catapult-esque system.
Something where I could buy a fully working card with standard networking FPGA blocks to build against, and have the FPGA mesh and PCI(e) connectors "just work" with minimal config.
I've never moved off "well, that's cute" on demo boards because the market requires a lot of hardware customization to do anything neat (eg, MS designing their own for this).
And, well, not to harp too much on the tooling... But the tooling is annoying. Workable, but annoying.
Even OpenCL->HDL wasn't the huge boon it was supposed to be.
2) OpenCL->HDL takes hours to complete due to need to synthesize, whereas OpenCL->CPU code takes seconds at worst. The time to get working (synthesized) code is major blocking factor in utilizing FPGAs anywhere.
If it uses the standard hyperv driver, can a guest be migrated live between accelerated and unaccelerated hosts?
TL;DW:
- FPGAs are more power-efficient than CPUs and GPUs
- FPGAs are more flexible than ASICs
FPGAs vs CPUs:
- CPU: Sequentially apply instructions on data in place
- FPGA: In parallel, flow data through instructions in place
Relevant but not deep: https://redmondmag.com/blogs/the-schwartz-report/2016/10/dif...
