Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), graphics processing
units (GPUs) and Sony¡¯s PlayStation 2 vector units offer
scope for hardware acceleration of applications. We compare
the performance of these architectures using a unified
description based on A Stream Compiler (ASC) for FPGAs,
which has been extended to target GPUs and PS2 vector
units. Programming these architectures from a single description
enables us to reason about optimizations for the
different architectures. Using the ASC description we implement
a Montecarlo simulation, a Fast Fourier Transform
(FFT) and a weighted sum algorithm. Our results show that
without much optimization the GPU is suited to the Montecarlo
simulation, while the weighted sum is better suited
to PS2 vector units. FPGA implementations benefit particularly
from architecture specific optimizations which ASC
allows us to easily implement by adding simple annotations
to the shared code.