modern cpus are awesome you can play games create content and even watch tech
explainer videos with handsome hosts i guess it was supposed to be someone else
on the same machine but as great as this versatility is there are times when
you'd really rather have a chip that can do just one thing but do it really
really well now there are lots of electronics that contain chips called
asics or fpgas instead of regular cpus
and we're going to explain what these are one at a time starting with asics
not to be confused with the shoe company asic stands for application specific
integrated circuit and it does exactly what it sounds like processes data for
one application this is because asics are built very
differently from your typical x86 or ARM
or risk 5 general processor
a regular processor can apply many different kinds of calculations
depending on what a program needs but asics are hardwired to perform only the
calculations or to run only the algorithms that are needed for a
specific task this hardwiring can happen in a couple of ways some asics are
manufactured in what's called a semi-custom manner where the fab has
what's essentially a blank template of logic gates which are then permanently
connected according to the design the client needs meanwhile other a6 are full custom
designs where the entire chip and every transistor is pretty much designed from
scratch unsurprisingly because asics are so specialized they take a lot of time
and money to develop but because asics are usually for small highly integrated
devices that ship lots of units the cost of an individual asic tends to be quite
low for example the chips inside usb
chargers or network switches or even electronic toys are often asics but all
of these are often low cost products network switches are particularly
interesting applications since a simple 15 unmanaged switch can handle network
traffic better than a desktop CPU that costs 10 times as much but of course
there's a good chance you've heard of asic-based crypto miners designed to run
cryptographic hashes much more efficiently than a graphics card can and
those are quite expensive due to both demand and the fact that they aren't as
mass-produced as other asic-based devices
and of course there's the fact that they make you money
we'll tell you about the other kind of chip we're discussing today the fpga
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let's switch gears right now and talk about fpgas or field programmable gate
arrays how are those different you can think of these as sitting
somewhere between an asic and a CPU
their logic can be customized for specific applications but unlike asics
they can actually be electrically reprogrammed after they've been
manufactured you can think of the structure of an fpga as being kind of
like lego blocks once you put them together they'll stay that way but you
can always take them apart and put them back together and make something
completely different now although fpgas aren't quite as
powerful as purpose-built asics their versatility has made them increasingly
popular for machine learning applications as they can be optimized
for different ai models in neural networks yet still outperform
traditional cpus and even gpus but
perhaps even more interesting is that you can reconstruct other kinds of
processors inside an fpga including the
ones from say for example retro game consoles
there have been some really cool projects that use an fpga to recreate
the retro gaming experience as faithfully as possible such as the
nt-mini and the mega sg from analog the
fpgas inside those consoles contain circuitry that very closely mimics the
original nes and sega genesis processors
respectively meaning that it's a much smoother and more accurate experience
than software emulation like what gets used by those classic plug-and-play
consoles that have gained popularity recently another really awesome fpga project is
the mr another gaming device that actually allows you to choose between
different old-school consoles and arcade games then reprogram the fpga on the fly
according to what you want to play it's kind of like a transformer but on the
inside like that time i washed down a mentos with a bottle of pepsi
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