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Comment by molticrystal | Hacker News Reader

How many Titan Xs can you purchase for the price of a Intel Stratix 10, including the kit required to start development?

I saw some of their II-V kits costing 1-100k+ but didn't find the Stratix 10 mentioned in the article in their kit list: https://www.buyaltera.com/Search?keywords=stratix+kit&pNum=1

>Intel Stratix 10 FPGA is 10%, 50%, and 5.4x better in performance (TOP/sec) than Titan X Pascal GPU on GEMMs for sparse, Int6, and binarized DNNs

My guess is that while electricity costs would be much higher, it would be better at this time to still just buy ceil(.1, .5, 5.4) Titans instead.

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>>> How many Titan Xs can you purchase for the price of a Intel Stratix 10, including the kit required to start development?

Actually, they are similar in price.

medium to high end consumer FPGA and GPU will go up to around $1k.

Then, there are the entreprisey GPU (Quadro and FireThing as I recall) going for a few k.

It's similar for FPGA. The very high-end (Stratix/Virtex) will charge a few k as well, peaking at 5k or 10k for the top models (nude FPGA chip only).

I recall negotiating some FPGA devkits in the 10-15k€ range, that seems to be the top end. If I remember well, there was an option to get 4 Virtex on the same devboard for 30k or 50k. That's as high as it gets.

My memory ain't perfect but that's about this much.

You can find engineering samples of the chips on Digikey: http://www.digikey.com/products/en?FV=ffecdb78&pkeyword=fpga

Looks like the cheapest one is $17k (so 15 Titan Xs? 24 1080Tis?), and I'd expect the price will be around that after full release.

I have a feeling that much of the cost is from the smaller market. It takes a massive amount of engineering resources to put out a new chip, and you need slot of sales to compensate. If FPGAs become commonplace in servers, then we will see a price decrease as it becomes easier to recouperate the overhead.

Nvidia says the 1080Ti is pretty much a Titan with 1GB less vram, but I don't remember if that had to do with ML.

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