Alex Rivera | Logout

CUDA or FPGA for special purpose 3D graphics computations?

Asked 2008-11-25T15:35:10.070
59

I am developing a product with heavy 3D graphics computations, to a large extent closest point and range searches. Some hardware optimization would be useful. While I know little about this, my boss (who has no software experience) advocates FPGA (because it can be tailored), while our junior developer advocates GPGPU with CUDA, because its cheap, hot and open. While I feel I lack judgement in this question, I believe CUDA is the way to go also because I am worried about flexibility, our product is still under strong development.

So, rephrasing the question, are there any reasons to go for FPGA at all? Or is there a third option?

hardware cuda fpga
Edit
Report

2 Answers

3

What are you deploying on? Who is your customer? Without even know the answers to these questions, I would not use an FPGA unless you are building a real-time system and have electrical/computer engineers on your team that have knowledge of hardware description languages such as VHDL and Verilog. There's a lot to it and it takes a different frame of mind than conventional programming.

answered 2009-10-21T20:26:57.990
3

I'm a CUDA developer with very littel experience with FPGA:s, however I've been trying to find comparisons between the two.

What I've concluded so far:

The GPU has by far higher ( accessible ) peak performance It has a more favorable FLOP/watt ratio. It is cheaper It is developing faster (quite soon you will literally have a "real" TFLOP available). It is easier to program ( read article on this not personal opinion)

Note that I'm saying real/accessible to distinguish from the numbers you will see in a GPGPU commercial.

BUT the gpu is not more favorable when you need to do random accesses to data. This will hopefully change with the new Nvidia Fermi architecture which has an optional l1/l2 cache.

my 2 cents

answered 2009-11-20T12:47:34.693

Your Answer