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modern cpus are awesome you can play games create content and even watch tech

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explainer videos with handsome hosts i guess it was supposed to be someone else

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on the same machine but as great as this versatility is there are times when

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you'd really rather have a chip that can do just one thing but do it really

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really well now there are lots of electronics that contain chips called

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asics or fpgas instead of regular cpus

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and we're going to explain what these are one at a time starting with asics

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not to be confused with the shoe company asic stands for application specific

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integrated circuit and it does exactly what it sounds like processes data for

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one application this is because asics are built very

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differently from your typical x86 or ARM

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or risk 5 general processor

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a regular processor can apply many different kinds of calculations

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depending on what a program needs but asics are hardwired to perform only the

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calculations or to run only the algorithms that are needed for a

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specific task this hardwiring can happen in a couple of ways some asics are

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manufactured in what's called a semi-custom manner where the fab has

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what's essentially a blank template of logic gates which are then permanently

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connected according to the design the client needs meanwhile other a6 are full custom

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designs where the entire chip and every transistor is pretty much designed from

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scratch unsurprisingly because asics are so specialized they take a lot of time

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and money to develop but because asics are usually for small highly integrated

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devices that ship lots of units the cost of an individual asic tends to be quite

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low for example the chips inside usb

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chargers or network switches or even electronic toys are often asics but all

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of these are often low cost products network switches are particularly

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interesting applications since a simple 15 unmanaged switch can handle network

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traffic better than a desktop CPU that costs 10 times as much but of course

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there's a good chance you've heard of asic-based crypto miners designed to run

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cryptographic hashes much more efficiently than a graphics card can and

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those are quite expensive due to both demand and the fact that they aren't as

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mass-produced as other asic-based devices

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and of course there's the fact that they make you money

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we'll tell you about the other kind of chip we're discussing today the fpga

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right after we thank grammarly for sponsoring this video thanks to

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let's switch gears right now and talk about fpgas or field programmable gate

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arrays how are those different you can think of these as sitting

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somewhere between an asic and a CPU

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their logic can be customized for specific applications but unlike asics

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they can actually be electrically reprogrammed after they've been

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manufactured you can think of the structure of an fpga as being kind of

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like lego blocks once you put them together they'll stay that way but you

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can always take them apart and put them back together and make something

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completely different now although fpgas aren't quite as

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powerful as purpose-built asics their versatility has made them increasingly

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popular for machine learning applications as they can be optimized

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for different ai models in neural networks yet still outperform

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traditional cpus and even gpus but

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perhaps even more interesting is that you can reconstruct other kinds of

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processors inside an fpga including the

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ones from say for example retro game consoles

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there have been some really cool projects that use an fpga to recreate

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the retro gaming experience as faithfully as possible such as the

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nt-mini and the mega sg from analog the

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fpgas inside those consoles contain circuitry that very closely mimics the

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original nes and sega genesis processors

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respectively meaning that it's a much smoother and more accurate experience

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than software emulation like what gets used by those classic plug-and-play

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consoles that have gained popularity recently another really awesome fpga project is

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the mr another gaming device that actually allows you to choose between

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different old-school consoles and arcade games then reprogram the fpga on the fly

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according to what you want to play it's kind of like a transformer but on the

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inside like that time i washed down a mentos with a bottle of pepsi

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oh subscribe that's the end