D vs. C#

[Daniel Keep]

Bruce Adams wrote:
> 0ffh Wrote:
> 
>> BCS wrote:
>>> Reply to 0ffh,
>>>> Right now I ain't talking practical anymore. There was a clear
>>>> challenge regarding basic truths. Basic truth is: Hardware is
>>>> faster... :-P
>>> I agree. But another basic truth is; if it ain't practical, /we/ ain't 
>>> go'na get it.  Yet.
>> Well, I still have my FPGA kit.... heh! =)
>>
>> Regards, Frank
> 
> I was going to raise that point. I think FPGAs are still too small, slow and expensive to compete at the moment but perhaps in the future.
> Transmeta had a similar idea but they lost to the might of the intel / AMD war. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta).
> How are you finding your kit? I was thinking about getting some kit a while back. Have you got a D 'compiler' for it or indeed anything that turns higher level code (other than VHDL) directly into hardware?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Bruce.
> 

This is going way off-topic, but I remember reading a paper once where a
group of researchers had taken some fairly well-optimised open-source
speech recognition engine, and re-implemented it using an FPGA.
Comparing against the software implementation running on a pretty fast
machine, the FPGA blew it out of the water.  It was something on the
order of 10 times faster, on a fraction of the power, memory and clock
speed.

But yes, different tools for different jobs.  I'm just pointing out that
FPGAs have been used to improve performance beyond what could be done
with a general purpose system.

	-- Daniel