111–120 of 212 posts
If you don't click through to read about this: you can write an FPGA image in verilog/VHDL and upload it... and then run it. To me that seems like magic. HDK here: https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga (I work for AWS)
Let this day be known as the beginning of the end general-compute infrastructure for internet scale services.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess this will be a game changer for FPGA-mineable digital currencies. Maybe not for Bitcoin, because people have invested heavily into dedicated mining hardware, but I'm interested to see what it'll do for the smaller altcoins.
For any cryptocurrency that's profitably mineable on AWS the difficulty immediately increases to the point that it's no longer profitable.
Consumer ASICs stopped being a thing for this reason. Now we have mega-secret custom hardware that can't be shared without destroying the investment put into their development.
I don't think Satoshi's intention was that only a handful of massive investors with their own proprietary chipsets would be able to mine, but that's the natural consequence of the difficulty mechanism, and it really undermines bitcoin's core principle of decentralization.
For my institute this is going to be _really_ useful for Genomics data processing because we can't justify buying expensive hardware for undergrad research. Using a FPGA hardware over cloud sounds almost magical!
You can't justify buying it but you can justify renting it? Has your department heard of amortization?
OK, here's a concrete question: I have a vector of 64 floats. I want to multiply it with a matrix of size 64xN, where N is on the order of 1 billion. How fast can I do this multiplication, and find the top K elements of the resulting N-dimensional array?
Are these custom fpgas or an Altera or Xylinx?
I'm a total FPGA n00b, so here's a dumb question: what can you do with this FPGA that you can't with a GPU? OK, here's a concrete question: I have a vector of 64 floats. I want to multiply it with a matrix of size 64xN, where N is on the order of 1 billion. How fast can I do this multiplication, and find the top K elements of the resulting N-dimensional array?
Hopefully, by browsing that list, you can see how FPGAs aren't really directly comparable to something like a GPU.
The traditional EDA tool companies (Mentory, Cadence, Synopsys) all tried offering their tools under a could/SaaS model a few years back and nobody went for it. Chip designers are too paranoid about their source code leaking. I wonder if that attitude will hamper adoption of this model as well?
It's more an issue of being able to reproduce an existing build later on. You can't delegate ownership of the toolchain to the "cloud" (read: somebody else's computer) if you think you'll ever need to maintain the design in the future.