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Open-Dragonfly6825 OP t1_j72yyst wrote

Reply to comment by AzureNostalgia in Why are FPGAs better than GPUs for deep learning? by Open-Dragonfly6825

Could you elaborate on some of the points you make? I have read the opposite to what you say regarding the folliwng points:

  • Many scientific works claim that FPGAs have similar or better power (energy) efficiency than GPUs in almost all applications.
  • FPGAs are considered a good AI technology for embedded devices where low energy consumption is key. Deep Learning models can be trained somewhere else, using GPUs, and, theoretically, inference can be done on the embedded devices using the FPGAs, for good speed and energy efficiency. (Thus, FPGAs are supposedly well-suited for inference.)
  • Modern high-end (data center) FPGAs target 300 MHz clock speeds as base speeds. It is not unusual for designs to achieve performances higher than 300 MHz. Not much higher, though, unless you highly optimize the design and use some complex tricks to boost the clock speeds.

The comparison you make about the largest FPGA being comparable only to small embedded GPUs is interesting. I might look more into that.

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AzureNostalgia t1_j732f33 wrote

The claim that FPGAs have better power efficiency than GPUs is a reminiscent of the past. In the real world and industry (and not in scientific papers which are written by PhDs) GPUs achieve way higher performance. The simple reason is FPGAs as devices are way behind in architecture, compute capacity and capabilities.

A very simple way to see my point is this. Check one of the largest FPGAs from Xilinx, the Alveo U280 (https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/alveo/u280.html#specifications). It theoretically can achieve up to 24.5 INT8 TOPs AI performance and it's a 225W card. Now check a similar architecture (in nm) embedded GPU, the AGX xavier (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-systems/jetson-agx-xavier/). Check the specs on the bottom. Up to 22TOPs in a 30W device. That's why FPGAs are obsolete. I have countless examples like that but you get the idea.

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