>So as long as FPGAs are attached on relatively glacially slow I/O buses
-- including 32-bit 33 MHz PCI
GPUs are on the PCI bus, aren't they? Has something changed in the last two decades to increase bandwidth?
GPUs are on the PCI bus, aren't they? Has something changed in the last two decades to increase bandwidth?
PCIe 3: 16 lanes * 8 Gtransfers/s * 128/130 (encoding) : ~126 Gbit/s
So, yes, it has changed quite a bit!
But so has everything else.
If you want performance, you still better do it through DMA transfers that bypass the CPU, because otherwise, the CPU will still be waiting for thousands of cycles to fetch data from the device on the other side of the bus.
And the transfers that are done by the CPU should be write-only to the bus as much as possible.
But PCIe 3 is a whole different beast than PCI.