> FPGAs will never rival gpus or TPUs for inference. The main reason is that GPUs aren't really gpus anymore.

Yeah. Even for Bitcoin mining GPUs dominated FPGAs. I created the Bitcoin mining FPGA project(s), and they were only interesting for two reasons: 1) they were far more power efficient, which in the case of mining changes the equation significantly. 2) GPUs at the time had poor binary math support, which hampered their performance; whereas an FPGA is just one giant binary math machine.

I have wondered if it is possible to make a mining algorithm FPGA-hard in the same way that RandomX is CPU-hard and memory-hard. Relative to CPUs, the "programming time" cost is high.

Nice username btw.