Towards Comparing Performance of Algorithms in Hardware and Software

In this paper, we report on a preliminary investigation of the potential performance gain of programs implemented in field-programmable gate array's (FPGAs) using a high-level language Chisel compared to ordinary high-level software implementations executed on general-purpose computers and embedded systems. FPGAs inherently supports parallel evaluations while the sequential computers do not, and for this preliminary investigation we have chosen a highly parallelizable program as case study to show an upper bound of performance gain. The purpose is to demonstrate whether or not programming FPGAs has a potential for performance optimizations of ordinary programs. We have developed and evaluated Conway's Game of Life for an FPGA, an embedded system Raspberry Pi 4, and a MacBook Pro Laptop. We have compared the performance of programs over different input sizes to decide the relative increase in runtime.