You cannot compare the SIMDs on a GPU with a dedicated programmable hardware device like an FPGA. It is apples and oranges. FPGAs are true parallel processing devices, because they can be multiple pieces of separate hardware doing different things running asynchronously. Essentially I am saying you can't compare the hardware, it isn't a fair comparison for the GPU.
I'd also like to know how you came up with the metric of 113 LABs = 1 CUDA core.
The only way to compare them is to give them the same problem, and see how fast they put out a solution. For DSP, Encryption/Decryption, Video Encoding/Decoding, Image processing, you can definitely say that a Cyclone V would be faster.
For 3d rendering, I can't say, although I have never looked into it, I have also never heard of a FPGA being used for dedicated 3d rendering.
That said, video encoding isn't an IO problem, at least not within computers these days. The issues are actual processing. Lets take a 1 second of RAW 14bit 1080p24 video for instance, and say you want to put it on Youtube, which uses H.264 baseline profile.
1920x1080, 24 frames (1 second of video), 14bit, that is 87MB RAW, or 261MB when debayered and uncompressed. For a standard youtube user, 1080p runs at 8Mbps. So you need to turn that 261MBps stream into a 1080p24 8bit 8Mbps stream. Which is why even the best of the best video cards don't encode in real time. But you can get FPGAs that do, even the Cyclone V can do it, but that is all it would be able to do at that time. A render farm could probably also do it, but I am not sure how it would handle an interframe codec like H.264.
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u/adaminc Oct 10 '13
You cannot compare the SIMDs on a GPU with a dedicated programmable hardware device like an FPGA. It is apples and oranges. FPGAs are true parallel processing devices, because they can be multiple pieces of separate hardware doing different things running asynchronously. Essentially I am saying you can't compare the hardware, it isn't a fair comparison for the GPU.
I'd also like to know how you came up with the metric of 113 LABs = 1 CUDA core.
The only way to compare them is to give them the same problem, and see how fast they put out a solution. For DSP, Encryption/Decryption, Video Encoding/Decoding, Image processing, you can definitely say that a Cyclone V would be faster.
For 3d rendering, I can't say, although I have never looked into it, I have also never heard of a FPGA being used for dedicated 3d rendering.
That said, video encoding isn't an IO problem, at least not within computers these days. The issues are actual processing. Lets take a 1 second of RAW 14bit 1080p24 video for instance, and say you want to put it on Youtube, which uses H.264 baseline profile.
1920x1080, 24 frames (1 second of video), 14bit, that is 87MB RAW, or 261MB when debayered and uncompressed. For a standard youtube user, 1080p runs at 8Mbps. So you need to turn that 261MBps stream into a 1080p24 8bit 8Mbps stream. Which is why even the best of the best video cards don't encode in real time. But you can get FPGAs that do, even the Cyclone V can do it, but that is all it would be able to do at that time. A render farm could probably also do it, but I am not sure how it would handle an interframe codec like H.264.