The Arithmetic Operators You Will Never See in a Microprocessor

Abstract

It has been shown that FPGAs could outperform high-end microprocessors even on floating-point computations, thanks to massive parallelism. Too often, however, such studies re-implement in the FPGA the operators present in a processor. An FPGA can do much better: it can accomodate hardware operators that would make no economical sense in a general-purpose processor, and it can taylor them just right to the needs of the application. This talk tries to survey this idea systematically, discussing its potential, exhibiting some exotic (but useful) operators developed in the FloPoCo project, and listing some of the challenges ahead.