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by shaklee3 2435 days ago
Small error in the article: 200*10e6 is 2GHz, not 200MHz.
1 comments

Ha, good eye. corrected to 1e6 :)
Nice work. FPGA design appears to be very similar to GPU shader programming. First time I've read anything about FPGA design that connected. Usually FPGA stories get lost in data flow jargon and I learn nothing.
There is no programming in FPGA at all. You describe your hardware using hardware description languages like VHDL or Verilog.
You'll notice I didn't apply the term 'programming' to FPGA. Reading the post I noted this was a likely hang up among FPGA designers and carefully employed the preferred jargon. I imagine this sensitivity is the product of much frustration with forever being conflated with mere programmers. Must be awful.
Then no programming exists at all. When writing a C code you are describing a program that runs on the C abstract machine. The same thing holds for all "programming" languages.
Sorry, I am not ready for philosophical discussion. We can take definition from Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming Programming involves code execution on computer. There is no computer in FPGA.
Then why did you start the discussion? An FPGA is a computer just as well as any CPU.
I don’t really see how FPGA programming is similar to shader programming.
Thanks! I too think GPU programming is quite similar in that you need to think of things in a more data streaming sense. It's sort of functional that way too; building up pipelines of transforms.
Very nice article, thanks.

That would more typically be written as 200e6, no need for the explicit multiplication when using standard float literal notation.