The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs
As a bit of a counterpoint:<p>One of my prior projects involved working with a lot of ex-FPGA developers. This is obviously a rather biased group of people, but I saw a lot of feedback around that was very negative about FPGAs.<p>One comment that&#x27;s telling is that since the 90s, FPGAs were seen as the obvious &quot;next big technology&quot; for HPC market... and then Nvidia came out and pushed CUDA hard, and now GPGPUs have cornered the market. FPGAs are still trying to make inroads (the article here mentions it), but the general sense I have is that success has not been forthcoming.<p>The issue with FPGAs is you start with a clock rate in the 100s of MHz (exact clock rate is dependent on how long the paths need to be), compared with a few GHz for GPUs and CPUs. Thus you need a 5× performance win from switching to an FPGA just to break even, and you probably need another 2× on top of that to motivate people going through the pain of FPGA programming. Nvidia made GPGPU work by being able to demonstrate meaningful performance gains to make the cost of rewriting code worth it; FPGAs have yet to do that.<p>Edit: It&#x27;s worth noting that the programming model of FPGAs has consistently been cited as the thing holding back FPGAs for the past 20 years. The success of GPGPU, despite the need to move to a different programming model to achieve gains there, and the inability of the FPGA community to furnish the necessary magic programming model suggests to me (and my FPGA-skeptic coworkers) that the programming model isn&#x27;t the actual issue preventing FPGAs from succeeding, but that FPGAs have structural issues (e.g., low clock speeds) that prevent their utility in wider market classes.