Measuring The Power-Constrained Performance And Energy Gap Between Fpgas And Processors

This work measures the performance and power consumption gap between the current generation of low power FPGAs and low power microprocessors (microcontrollers) through an implementation of the Canny edge detection algorithm. In particular, the algorithm is implemented on Altera MAX 10 FPGAs and its performance and power consumption are then compared to the same algorithm implemented on the STMicroelectronics' implementation of the ARM M-series microcontrollers. We found an extremely high, four- to five-orders of magnitude, performance advantage of the FPGAs over the microcontrollers, which is much greater than any previously reported values in FPGAs vs. processors studies. Furthermore, this speedup only comes at a cost of 1.2x to 15x higher power consumption, which gives FPGAs a significant advantage in energy efficiency. We also observe, however, the current generation of low power FPGAs have significantly higher static power consumption than the microcontrollers. In particular, the low power FPGAs consume more static power than the total power consumption of the lowest power consuming microcontrollers, rendering the FPGAs inoperable under the power budgets of these processors. Furthermore, this high static power consumption exists despite the fact that the FPGAs are implemented on a low leakage 55nm process with dual supply voltages while the microcontrollers are implemented on a conventional, single supply voltage, 90nm process. Consequently, our results indicate that it is particular important for future research to address the static power consumption of low power FPGAs while maintaining logic capacity so the performance and energy efficiency advantages of the FPGAs can be fully utilized in the extremely low power application domain that are driven by batteries with very small form factors and emerging small scale energy harvesting technologies.