Parallel designs
FPGAs, being a blank slate, provide the fabric we can use to construct various applications. People use FPGAs for signal processing applications such as software-defined radio (SDR), high performance computing applications, and, more recently, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
ML and AI and massive parallelism
In recent years, ML and AI have boomed. Self-driving cars, deep fake generation and analysis, and market predictions are but a few of the topics that these applications have been applied to.
It's easy to see why. The Artix part we are targeting has up to 240 DSP blocks. The largest Virtex Ultrascale+ that Xilinx makes has almost 4,000 DSP blocks and 9,000 Logic cells. Xilinx advertises up to 38.3 TOP/s for INT8 operations in the VU13P.
It's beyond the scope of this book to provide an overall introduction, but I would certainly encourage investigating the resources available for parallel designs.
