Forum Discussion
New ContributorFPGA Float Performance?
New ContributorThank you. Your detailed comments are quite helpful. Given the price:performance curve of the hardware, I don't think the FPGA board is suitable for offloading physics equations (mostly Navier-Stokes calculations in my target case). Another problem is 32-bit float. Most of these calculations need double precision for industrial-sized problems, but I thought it was worth a try with the current hardware.
Frequent ContributorIndeed FPGAs are not ready (and probably never will be) for 64-bit calculations; however, there is a strong initiative in the the HPC and scientific computing communities towards rethinking precision requirements since 64-bit computation is too expensive on any hardware, and the majority of real-world applications are memory-bound on modern hardware anyway, which means we are just wasting silicon space by putting more 64-bit ALUs in our chips. You can refer to the following publication for quantitative results:
