FPGAs vs. CPUs: trends in peak floating-point performance

Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on a de-vice doubles every two years; however, it is often (mis)quoted based on its impact on CPU performance. This important corollary of Moore’s Law states that improved clock fre-quency plus improved architecture yields a doubling of CPU performance every 18 months. This paper examines the im-pact of Moore’s Law on the peak floating-point performance of FPGAs. Performance trends for individual operations are analyzed as well as the performance trend of a common in-struction mix (multiply accumulate). The important result is that peak FPGA floating-point performance is growing significantly faster than peak floating-point performance for a CPU