Why Put FPGAs in your CPU socket?

Abstract

Summary form only given. Ever since FPGAs were invented, there has been great interest in using them as computing devices, and with the logic densities of today's devices, many interesting functions have been shown to have significant performance and energy benefits when implemented in FPGAs. However, when an application requires the combination of a high-performance CPU and an FPGA accelerator, the effectiveness of the FPGA is highly determined by the latency and bandwidth between the CPU, the CPU memory system and the FPGA and its memory system. Putting FPGAs into the CPU socket is one way to address this issue. This talk will present the history, the advantages and disadvantages, the challenges, architectures, programming models and applications of "insocket" accelerator systems.