Latest FPGAs Show Big Gains in Floating Point Performance [HPC Wire]

This is the fourth in a series of HPCwire articles comparing the theoretical floating point performance of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) to microprocessors. As shown in the last article, the performance gap continues to expand between these two classes of devices. Comparing theoretical peaks for 64-bit floating point arithmetic, the current generation of Xilinx’s Virtex-7 FPGAs is about 4.2 times faster than a 16-core microprocessor. This is up from a factor of 2.9X as reported in 2010.