You can argue that a 4090 is more of a 'flagship' model on the consumer market, but it could be just a typing error, and then you miss the point and the knowledge you could have learned:

"Their system, FlightVGM, recorded a 30 per cent performance boost and had an energy efficiency that was 4½ times greater than Nvidia’s flagship RTX 3090 GPU – all while running on the widely available V80 FPGA chip from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), another leading US semiconductor firm."

So they have found a way to use a 'off-the-shelf' FPGA and are using it for video inference, and to me it looks like it could match a 4090(?), but who cares. With this upgrade, these standard Fpga's are cheaper(running 24/7)/better than any consumer Nvidia GPU up to at least 3090/4090.

And here from the paper:

"[problem] ..sparse VGMs [video generating models] cannot fully exploit the effective throughput (i.e., TOPS) of GPUs. FPGAs are good candidates for accelerating sparse deep learning models. However, existing FPGA accelerators still face low throughput ( < 2TOPS) on VGMs due to the significant gap in peak computing performance (PCP) with GPUs ( > 21× ).

[solution] ..we propose FlightVGM, the first FPGA accelerator for efficient VGM inference with activation sparsification and hybrid precision. [..] Implemented on the AMD V80 FPGA, FlightVGM surpasses NVIDIA 3090 GPU by 1.30× in performance and 4.49× in energy efficiency on various sparse VGM workloads."

You'll have to look up what that means yourself, but expect a throng of bitcrap miner cards to be converted to VLM accelerators, and maybe give new life for older/smaller/cheaper fpga's ?

Thanks for taking the time to clarify all that.

It's not a typo because the paper itself does mention 3090 as a benchmark.

I do tinker with FPGAs at home, for the fun of if (I'm no expert but the fact that I own few already shows that I know more about the topic than most people who don't even know what it is, or what it's for) so I'm quite aware of what some of the benefits (and trade of) can be. It's an interesting research path (again, otherwise I wouldn't even have invested my own resources to learn more about that architecture in the first place) so I'm not criticizing that either.

What I'm calling BS on... is the title and the "popularization" (and propaganda, let's be honest here) article. Qualifying a 5 years old chip as flagship (when, again, it never was) and implying what the title does, is wrong. It's overblown otherwise interesting work. That being said, I'm not surprised, OP share this kind of things regularly, to the point that I ended up blocking him.

Edit: not sure if I really have to say so but the 4090, in March 2025, is NOT the NVIDIA flagship, that's 1 generation behind. I'm not arguing for the quality of NVIDIA or AMD or whatever chip here. I'm again only trying to highlight the sensationalization of the article to make the title look more impressive.

Edit2: the 5090, in March 2025 again, is NOT even the flagship in this context anyway. That's only for gamers... but here the article, again, is talking about "energy-efficient AI systems" and for that, NVIDIA has an entire array of products, from Jetson to GB200. So... sure the 3090 isn't a "bad" card for a benchmark but in that context, it is no flagship.

PS: taking the occasion to highlight that I do wish OP to actually go to China, work and live there. If that's their true belief and they can do so, to not solely "admire" a political system from the outside, from the perspective of not participating to it, but rather give up on their citizenship and do move to China.