How much is the performance of modern FPGA relative to CPU and absolutly in (GFlops/GIops)?

Question

How much is the performance of modern FPGA relative to CPU, absolutly in (GFlops/GIops) and what is the cost of one billion integer operations per second on the FPGA? And in which tasks now beneficial to use FPGA? I only found it: http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2010-11-22/the_expanding_floating-point_performance_gap_between_fpgas_and_microprocessors.html

And an old article: http://www.mouldy.org/fpgas-in-cryptanalysis.pdf

Answer 1

Disclaimer: I work for SRC Computers, a heterogeneous CPU/FPGA system manufacturer.

"It depends", of course, is the answer.

A microprocessor is a fixed set of functional units. These perform reasonably well across a broad range of applications.

An FPGA is programmed by a designer with a specific set of functional units designed solely to execute a specific application. As such, it (often) performs very well for a given application.

"How much is the performance of modern FPGA relative to CPU, absolutely in (GFlops/GIops)" becomes a meaningless question. It can be answered for the the microprocessor as it has a fixed set of floating point units. However, for an FPGA, the question evolves into 1) how large if the FPGA, 2) how many floating point units can I pack into it and still do useful work, what is the memory/support architecture around the FPGA and 4) what are the sustained system bandwidths between the FPGA, its memory and the rest of the system?

The answer to "what is the cost of one billion integer operations per second on the FPGA" is similarly addressed by the preceding paragraph.

An interesting thing to keep in mind around performance is that in an FPGA, peak performance equals sustained performance since the FPGA is dedicated to executing a given application. As long as other system parameters do not interfere, of course.

Your question "And in which tasks now beneficial to use FPGA?" is a very broad question and grows with every large FPGA device release. In extremely broad non-exclusive terms, parallel and streaming applications benefit, although the application performance is to a large extent determined by the system architecture.