I am new to this site and had one question. I know typical CPUs have power consumption (TDP) in range of 100-200W, for example Intel Core2. I wanted to know what is typical power consumption of FPGAs. I saw this paper, where it says power consumption of Xilinx xc5vlx330 is 30W, but it gives no reference. I wanted some authoritative reference of any FPGA board (preferably high-performance FPGA) and any company. I searched online where they provide datasheets, but they do not clearly tell the power value, but only direct to power estimation tool.
Electronic – typical power consumption of FPGA devices
fpgapowerpower-consumption
Best Answer
The reason they direct you to a power estimation tool is because the power consumed depends very heavily on how hard the device is working.
Intel know that their processors will be clocked at the max rated frequency (at least some of the time) and that all the processing units will be used (at least some of the time).
Xilinx have no idea what their customers will do. It may be that the design is slightly too big for a small device, so needs the larger device, hence only (for example) 60% of it is used and the other 40% lies idle, not consuming dynamic power. Most time customers cannot clock the entire device at anything close to the theoretical fmax, so that reduces dyanamic power also.
If you were to calculate a theoretical max power dissipation, it wouldn't help much as you'd then end up overspecifying your power and cooling subsystems by a factor of (guessing) 2x to 4x!