Microsoft's FPGA Translates Wikipedia in less than a Tenth of a Second

They claim something impressive ("Translate Wikipedia in less than a Tenth of a Second") but give no details about the task nor the system.

If the claim is not total marketing nonsense I would imply that they mean t ranslating from one language to another (e.g. English to German).

From the article link (and the picture) you could also imply that one FPGA (or the card in the hand of the guy) does this. But this is simply unbeliev able. So the question is: How many FPGAs are involved? With out this, the c laimed time is simply not meaningful, as double the number of FPGA will mea n half the time (every Wikipedia article can be translated individually, so it is easy to execute the task in parallel...).

But I guess this is all not Microsoft's fault, but the problem of that spec ific link. I found following which gives much more insight at the end of th e page:

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There it says that 4 FPGAs (Stratix V D5, ca. 500k LE) would require 4 hour s to translate Wikipedia. The 0.1 seconds are achieved with a huge cloud of such FPGA equipped systems...

Of course still impressive, but not the same as most people might think aft er reading the headline. (And it also makes me wonder about the future of t he Altera/Intel low cost FPGAs, when to want to sell a Stratix into every s erver...)

Regards,

Thomas

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Reply to
thomas.entner99
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It could be that it was merely translating from wiki markup to HTML

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Reply to
Jasen Betts

For sure the release is short of engineering data... it *is* a marketing pitch. The point is they plan to be providing a combination of FPGA and CPU which will run much faster and use less power than the CPU alone. No, they aren't offering hard numbers and the task of translating wikipedia is not really the best benchmark for serving up or searching web pages. It is meant to offer a metric that even laymen can relate to.

In other words, it's meant to sound good to those who would not understand more engineering information.

Microsoft has no incentive to sell FPGAs. Their incentive is to provide the software on faster hardware. If the hardware doesn't pan out, Microsoft gets nothing but expenses.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

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