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by KirillPanov 1039 days ago
> And now we find if you can go to four bits

That will be really interesting for FPGAs, because the current ones are basically oceans of 4-bit computers.

Yes, you can gang together a pair of 4LUTs to make a 5LUT, and a pair of 5LUTs to make a 6LUT, but you halve your parallelism each time you do that. OTOH you can't turn a 4LUT into a pair of 3LUTs on any currently-manufactured FPGA. It's simply the "quantum unit" of currently-available hardware -- and it's been that way for at least 15 years (Altera had 3LUTs back in the 2000s). There's no fundamental reason for the number 4 -- but it is a very, very deep local minimum for the current (non-AI) customers of FPGA vendors.