FPGA thread

>>1185281
How do fpgas work? I've always wanted to use one for crypto currency mining but I don't know anything about electrical engineering.

Field programmable gate array. Its a programmable array of logic gates. Unlike a computer processor that has things like a dedicated arithmetic unit, cache memory, io control, etc that you interact with by giving it op codes. An FPGA allows you to directly program how the gates function, something CPUs don't allow you to do. This means they are very good at doing a single thing very fast. I guess an easy way of pitting is that CPUs are engineered to be pretty fast at most things, whereas you can program an FPGA to be the fastest at one.

>>1185308
An FPGA is still much slower than any ASIC at that single task.

>>1185312
Just look into it. I had no idea the made application specific chips for bitcoin mining. Cool.

VHDL sucks!

That is all.

>>1185512

>so does Xilinx

>>1185312
wrong

>>1185512
wrong

>>1185515
wrong

>>1185536
wrong

>>1185546
Wrong.

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24KB, 400x338px

>>1185281
I've seen those things here and there but I haven't seen them used much, what are the advantages of a FPGA over a general microcontroller, PIC or ARM processor which every home appliance seems to have these days? Where are they used? Should I bother learning how to use one?

I only used VHDL once and it was pretty horrible stuff, my teacher used to call it Very Hard Difficult Language.

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113KB, 800x534px

>>1185643
>what are the advantages of a FPGA over a general microcontroller, PIC or ARM processor
Determinism.
You know exactly when everything happens - because it happens every clock tick.

For computationally-intensive real-time processing, FPGA is the way to go.

So where you could take an analog signal and run it through a DAC, feed it into a computer and work through an FFT on there... you could feed the FPGA data from the DAC and bring the FFT right into the PC for further analysis.

Or you set tolerances on a data stream, and let the FPGA filter everything, send/process only the signals/glitches/faults you're interested in on the CPU.

/diy/scord .gg/Q6jzD7V

>>1185653
Also wrong.

> Discord
Fuck off and shill elsewhere faggot.

>>1185653
Intel fpga on my CPU in 2020 i think?

>>1185653
You don't know shit. Spend thirty seconds on google before answering a question you have no clue about.

Microcontrollers are also deterministic, every instruction takes a known number of clock cycles. Even something like a raspi or full blown desktop computer has guaranteed timing if you run an RTOS.

The very superficial difference between a microcontroller and an FPGA is that the FPGA is parallelized, but they are vastly more different than that description suggests because you configure a microcontroller at the code level but an FPGA is configured at the circuit/gate level.

>>1185696
>if you run an RTOS

Sent from my RasPi running VxWorks

>>1185696
>The very superficial difference between a microcontroller and an FPGA is that
What am I reading!?