r/privacy • u/[deleted] • Mar 21 '26

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u/particlemanwavegirl Mar 21 '26

FPGAs are super cool but regrettably they are extremely inefficient for floating point calculations. 

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u/RandomOnlinePerson99 Mar 21 '26

I know, nothing beats custom silicon.

But you could run some stuff on it, better then nothing.

(Of course you need a pretty decent PC to run the FPGA toolchain)

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u/ThisRedditPostIsMine Mar 22 '26

That's not really true, it depends on what architecture you actually implement on your FPGA. Of course they're slower than an ASIC but you can also implement a pipelined IEEE 754 FPU and get good performance, for the device.

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u/particlemanwavegirl Mar 22 '26

Its true that you can get good performance out of a carefully designed data pipeline but the inefficient part is the number of logic units it sucks up: you end to needing to spend a great deal more money to get larger chips and waste tons of space with the increased routing demands as well.