[blattimwind]

> In the case of bitcoin mining as far as I know GPU's passed the hat directly to ASIC's. I never heard that FPGA's were competitive for that.

They were, before the ASICs came. CPU -> GPU -> FPGA -> ASIC. A classic story of specialization.

[Taek]

Ehhh not really. There was some FPGA mining that happened in Bitcoin but it was always niche rather than at-scale.

FPGAs are a lot better than GPUs from the perspective of energy efficiency, but the FPGAs themselves are very expensive to purchase, and are a lot more specialized than GPUs. ASICs showed up before FGPAs ever really took off, and even if ASICs hadn't showed up it's not clear that FGPAs would have been superior on a total-cost basis to GPUs except in niche circumstances.

[tgflynn]

> are a lot more specialized than GPUs.

What do you mean by "more specialized" ? FPGA's can implement any logic circuit whereas GPU's are optimized for highly parallel arithmetic computations. I don't understand how that makes FPGA's "more specialized". It seems like they are in fact more general.

[wmf]

You can't buy FPGAs at Fry's and you can't use them for gaming when you're not mining.

[dooglius]

FPGA designs can be more specialized than GPU kernels, because FPGAs are more general than GPUs.

[jkhdigital]

They are specialized in generality /s