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Ask HN: Compile FPGA programs on FPGA itself?

2 points by kamathln ↗ HN
[NOOB Alert] If FPGAs are so fast, and compiling FPGA programs on regular programs are so slow, why not write FPGA compilers that run on FPGA itself?

1 comment

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al2o3cr
FPGAs are "fast" for very specific workloads - in particular, things where you need lots of throughput and the problem divides up well into lots of parallel slices. For instance, routing packets between multiple 100Gb links or receiving many channels of high-speed radio data (cell towers).

FPGAs can also be really useful when simulating large custom logic chips (ASICs) that haven't been built yet at close-to-production speed (versus at 1000x slower than normal in software simulation)

Turning HDL code into a bitstream is not either kind of problem.