[astrodust]

FPGA type applications will probably pay way bigger dividends than GPU acceleration ever will.

GPUs excel at problems where you can apply exactly the same logic to lots of data in parallel. CPUs can handle branching cases, where each operation requires a lot of decisions, a lot better.

Sufficiently large FPGA chips could accelerate certain parts of the workflow, if not the whole thing, since they're extremely good at branching in parallel. This is why early FPGA Bitcoin implementations blew the doors off of any GPU solution, each round of the SHA hashing process can be run in parallel on sequentially ordered data if you organize it correctly.

[sliken]

I've heard that annually for a decade or so.

FPGAs run hot, don't have many transistors, limited clock rate, and are a pain to program.

So yeah a "Sufficiently large" chip, a "sufficiently fast clock", and a "sufficiently well written app" could theoretically do well. Problem is in the real world they aren't and developers aren't targeting them.

[astrodust]

CPUs and GPUs are a pain to program if you don't have the right tools. If it's tooling that's the huge impediment then maybe Intel's acquisition and (hopefully) tool realignment will help.

That the FPGAs use this proprietary and for all intents opaque binary format is not very helpful and is probably the biggest barrier.