"Results show that FPGAs offer comparable performance as well as 2.7 to 293 times better energy efficiency for the test cases that we implemented on all three platforms."
Here's a talk about compiling legacy C/C++ code to FPGAs. With a couple of modifications to the code they claim 100x-300x performance/watt improvement in various benchmarks.
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Microsoft Research has some papers on this, for example:
Where’s the Beef? Why FPGAs Are So Fast -- http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/70636/tr-2008-130.pdf
BLAS Comparison on FPGA, CPU and GPU -- http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/130834/ISVLSI_FINAL.pdf
"Results show that FPGAs offer comparable performance as well as 2.7 to 293 times better energy efficiency for the test cases that we implemented on all three platforms."
Here's a talk about compiling legacy C/C++ code to FPGAs. With a couple of modifications to the code they claim 100x-300x performance/watt improvement in various benchmarks.
slides: http://msrvideo.vo.msecnd.net/rmcvideos/103696/dl/103696.pdf
video: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=103...
For example they have a Black Scholes simulation that runs 30x faster and uses 6W of power instead of 68W. That's >300x power efficiency.