<story><title>FPGAs for Dummies [pdf]</title><url>http://www.altera.com/literature/misc/FPGAs_For_Dummies_eBook.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>asynchronous13</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been using an embedded system based on a combination of FPGA and DSP for about ten years now. If I could go back in time and start over, I would ditch the FPGA. The reason I say that is because of the time costs associated with realizing any benefit of an FPGA design.&lt;p&gt;1) FPGA based design is &amp;quot;future proof&amp;quot;, we can use the same hardware to interface with new sensors in the future!&lt;p&gt;Reality: we could spin a new rev of the circuit board faster than we can develop and debug the new interface in the FPGA.&lt;p&gt;2) everything can done in parallel!&lt;p&gt;Reality: it&amp;#x27;s faster (development time) to put a soft core CPU on the FPGA and write linear c code to get the job done. When that solution runs fast enough, why spend more time optimizing?&lt;p&gt;Bad FPGA developers are hard to find, good FPGA developers are nearly impossible to find.&lt;p&gt;FPGAs are super cool. For certain niche applications they can&amp;#x27;t be beat. But most of the time, the development cost is just not worth it.</text></comment>
<story><title>FPGAs for Dummies [pdf]</title><url>http://www.altera.com/literature/misc/FPGAs_For_Dummies_eBook.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>malanj</author><text>Interesting, they claim a 5x power efficiency for FPGAs over GPUs in Monte Carlo Black-Scholes simulation.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://postimg.org/image/6o52lcgir/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;postimg.org&amp;#x2F;image&amp;#x2F;6o52lcgir&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if Amazon will start hosting FPGA boosted compute instances anytime soon...</text></comment>