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I have done a lot of GPU programming, and interested in looking into FPGA for low power solutions. Will this situation improve with the release of OpenCL support?


OpenCL support for FPGAs is super limited and only done through vendor specific tools. The point of these tools is more to LET you write your FPGA program that runs outside of a desktop computer in OpenCL than it is to make an FPGA be able to speed up your OpenCL program running on a desktop. So it is not like 'I will pop in a new FPGA card so I can play better games.' Though that is what i want to happen in the next...... lets say 5-10 years.


You're confusing OpenCL with high level synthesis (HLS). OpenCL is explicitly a platform for software developers. It targets accelerator boards attached to a host (via PCIE), just like GPGPU.

https://www.altera.com/solutions/partners/opencl-board-partn...


FPGAs are certainly not known for their low power consumption. Especially for something like an OpenCL workload, you'd probably do much better with a vector processor architecture, like on GPUs.


Hmm? FPGAs, in most cases, consume significantly less power than GPUs, unless GPU technology has caught up in the past year or so.


This is the opposite of my experience (assuming the same performance level). Though I consider FPGAs and GPUs mostly cut out for vastly different purposes. I unfortunately can't find a good reference to back this up because very few people do FPGA to GPU comparisons with anything more than a trivial FIR filter or FFT.




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