FPGAs will have very hard time to be as fast as "dedicated" CPUs, frequency-wise. The FPGA structures have to be too generic, and are much bigger than specialized structures of the CPUs, so they have higher capacity, which limits the maximum achievable switching frequency. The length of the wiring between the structures together with the lazy speed of light plays its role as well. However, the FPGA structure allows parallelizing of processing tasks, which can in some cases neatly beat the sequential CPUs. There are FPGAs with on-chip RISC CPU cores, allowing reaping the benefits of both architectures in a single chip. On Sat, 5 Mar 2005, Tyler Durden wrote:
Well, what would you call a network processor? An FPGA or a CPU? I think of it as somewhere in between, given credence to the FPGA statement below.
-TD
From: "Major Variola (ret)" <mv@cdc.gov> To: "cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net" <cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net> Subject: Re: SHA1 broken? Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 06:51:24 -0800
At 09:23 PM 2/19/05 +0000, Dave Howe wrote:
I am unaware of any massive improvement (certainly to the scale of the comparable improvement in CPUs) in FPGAs, and the ones I looked at a a few days ago while researching this question seemed to have pretty
FPGAs scale with tech the same as CPUs, however CPUs contain a lot more design info (complexity). But FPGAs since '98 have gotten denser (Moore's observation), pioneering Cu wiring, smaller features, etc.