As data center sprawl is now understood to be expensive and may not deliver performance increases for all types of applications, new technologies are coming to the rescue. A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing – hence “field-programmable”. While the use of GPUs and HPC accelerators are generally understood today, there are a number of misconceptions about FPGAs that need to be understood.
The first is that FPGAs are only good for embedded devices. However, this is not the case. FPGAs can be used to sift through the massive amounts of data that are created in any given time frame for Internet of Things (IoT) environments as well as a wide range of Big Data applications. FPGAs can be programmed to do many different tasks and are becoming more mainstream.
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