What happens if coins move to ethash-like algorithms where the efficiency gains would be alot smaller?
Thats the nature of crypto, you have to decide what risks and opportunities are right for you. Currently what Im proposing plays well in the acceleration role with GPUs for those algorithms. In 9-12 months both FPGAs and GPUs will be shipping with similar memory bandwidth and then FPGAs (imho) will be winning on power.
Next gen Radeon Vega is rumored to have up to 1.28 Terabyte/s mem bandwith. IS there any FPGA (or announced) that would pull the same kind of perf ?
The ultraram on the FPGA collectively have a total memory bandwidth of 5.1TB/s. The HBM2 on the next generation FPGA will have the same bandwidth as the vegas with HBM2 and those chips will still have ultraram on top of that.
LOL VCU1525 has only 33 MB of uram - it is nothing. This price overvalued FPGA's can mine only few algos. If the anti-asic and anti-fpga policy will be continued, this FPGA will mine nothing.
Main problem is small amount of high speed RAM and small amount of LUT. This is kicking out a lot of actual algos like equihash, ethash, CN-v7, X17, X16r, Lyra2Z, leaving fpgas with primitive low-profit algos like keccak, tribus, skunkhash, lyra2v2, etc.
33MB is a lot for on chip memory. VCU1525 also have up to 64GB of DDR4.