I wonder if FPGAs would make good crypto devices, e.g. for disk encryption? If you implement AES on an FPGA, is it fast enough to keep up with at least a SATA 3 SSD?
How FPGAs work, and why people will buy them (2013)
21–30 of 119 posts
Re: How FPGAs work, and why people will buy them (2013)
#22I've been considering getting an Arduino MKR Vidor 4000, which has an integrated FPGA and is fairly new. Does anyone here have any experience with this as a learning platform for FPGAs? (I already have reasonable experience with Arduino) Any suggestions for alternative boards/tech?
Re: How FPGAs work, and why people will buy them (2013)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
And to be fair, since then FPGAs have exploded in non ASIC prototyping use cases. They're even starting to be used for some consumer electronics.
FPGAs have been used in the industry for decades, basically every time you need high throughput and/or very low latencies and you don't have the volume to justify making an ASIC then FPGAs and CPLDs are the way to go. The article is not really talking about that though, it's more about having FPGAs in mainstream desktop computers. This is still far from a reality, even if Intel seems to be pushing for it.
This has been something FPGA fans have been pushing since I left college with my BsEE 30 years ago.
Re: How FPGAs work, and why people will buy them (2013)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually I recently bought a Spartan 7 based FPGA board after taking the nand2tetris course and started playing with the free version of the Vivado suite. If your complaint is principle based on the stuff being non free software, then it holds. If it's on usability - not sure it does. While lengthy, the process of compiling and getting something running on silicon didn't seem any more complicated than Grade/Maven etc…
> While lengthy, the process of compiling and getting something running on silicon didn't seem any more complicated than Grade/Maven etc all based Android Studio builds. I'm not sure many people would share your opinion that Gradle/Maven are uncomplicated. Personally, I would say they belong to the 20% most complicated build toolchains I have encountered - which would make the FPGA process still not very uncomplicate…
> Personally, I would say they belong to the 20% most complicated build toolchains I have encountered
I actually agree which is why I used that as a comparison. Over a million developers deal with it every day of their work lives and the FPGA tooling I dealt with did not seem any more complicated than something that's very mainstream.
Re: How FPGAs work, and why people will buy them (2013)
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate?
IEEE tracks a vast number of open standards and specifications (e.g., Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth). I guess the comment was pointing out that there is a degree of openness in EE.
I agree the EE community as whole is not bad. I would say though companies that hire EEs tend be more secretive than mainly software companies.
Re: How FPGAs work, and why people will buy them (2013)
#26I wonder if FPGAs would make good crypto devices, e.g. for disk encryption? If you implement AES on an FPGA, is it fast enough to keep up with at least a SATA 3 SSD?
Yes, they are used extensively in crypto applications for precisely that reason.
Re: How FPGAs work, and why people will buy them (2013)
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
And to be fair, since then FPGAs have exploded in non ASIC prototyping use cases. They're even starting to be used for some consumer electronics.
FPGAs have been used in the industry for decades, basically every time you need high throughput and/or very low latencies and you don't have the volume to justify making an ASIC then FPGAs and CPLDs are the way to go. The article is not really talking about that though, it's more about having FPGAs in mainstream desktop computers. This is still far from a reality, even if Intel seems to be pushing for it.
I mean, I know, I've professionally written HDL for FPGAs.
My point is that back then (a decade or so ago and farther back) it was relegated to low volume, high margin products, explicitly as a replacement for an ASIC. This was due to the cost of the FPGAs.
The point of this article is that by embracing the reprogrammable nature, they'll make their way into places that in fact have the volumes required for an ASIC (which might not be nearly as big as you might think), but choose an FPGA anyway in order to reconfigure out in the field. We are starting to see this and I'm seeing fairly cheap consumer electronics positions (ie. products in the range of a hundred or so dollars) asking for HDL experience more and more in my area.
Desktops aren't the only mass platform out there.
Re: How FPGAs work, and why people will buy them (2013)
#28I wonder if FPGAs would make good crypto devices, e.g. for disk encryption? If you implement AES on an FPGA, is it fast enough to keep up with at least a SATA 3 SSD?
Yea some FPGAs could do that.
Re: How FPGAs work, and why people will buy them (2013)
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
And to be fair, since then FPGAs have exploded in non ASIC prototyping use cases. They're even starting to be used for some consumer electronics.
FPGAs have been used in the industry for decades, basically every time you need high throughput and/or very low latencies and you don't have the volume to justify making an ASIC then FPGAs and CPLDs are the way to go. The article is not really talking about that though, it's more about having FPGAs in mainstream desktop computers. This is still far from a reality, even if Intel seems to be pushing for it.
Maybe the only one market segment where FPGAs aren't in wide use yet is desktop computers. iPhone 7 has iCE5LP4K inside, AWS provide FPGA-based instances, and Microsoft have even FPGA-powered NICs. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/08/azure_fpga_nics/
Re: How FPGAs work, and why people will buy them (2013)
#30I wonder if FPGAs would make good crypto devices, e.g. for disk encryption? If you implement AES on an FPGA, is it fast enough to keep up with at least a SATA 3 SSD?
I thought that CPU’s with AES-NI can already keep up.
EDIT: in fact I just looked up some benchmarks for Ryzen and it can do 3GB/s per core. So that should be enough