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Intel Gears Up for FPGA Push

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Re: Intel Gears Up for FPGA Push

#41

Post by adrianratnapala »

ww520 wrote: post #40

Can JIT run on FPGA? Use the JIT info to reconfigure the chip on the fly. Would there be enough speedup to justify the effort?

It sounds like it would be little different from a CPU implemented on an FPGA. True, you want to use run-time info to optimize on the fly, but my guess is that modern branch predictors, caches etc, already do as much of this stuff as we know how to do.

In the unforseeable future, then who knows, maybe the predictors will become so flexible that even conventional CPUs evolve into something like basically FPGAs.

Re: Intel Gears Up for FPGA Push

#42

Post by amelius »

chaosite wrote: post #36
mankash666 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a thought - I suppose you wanted to post with a throwaway account, but claiming to be the inventor of the patent gives your identity away

Sure, but this way his main account is not linked to his name.

Otoh, he could have just written "I've found this patent" and nobody would have known he was the author.

Re: Intel Gears Up for FPGA Push

#44

Post by nimish »

Tooling tooling tooling. FPGA hardware is cool but the tooling fucking sucks. Like stepping back into the time where you needed to pay thousands of dollars to get decent compilers and debuggers.

The ability for anyone to develop software for CPUs at zero-cost is an amazing freedom. You literally cannot do that on certain fpgas--not only do they cost thousands, so do the tools to actually create a working design.

Until that changes, FPGAs will always be niche.

Re: Intel Gears Up for FPGA Push

#45

Post by simias »

nimish wrote: post #44

Tooling tooling tooling. FPGA hardware is cool but the tooling fucking sucks. Like stepping back into the time where you needed to pay thousands of dollars to get decent compilers and debuggers. The ability for anyone to develop software for CPUs at zero-cost is an amazing freedom. You literally cannot do that on certain fpgas--not only do they cost thousands, so do the tools to actually create a working design. Unti…

I dream of a GCC/LLVM for FPGAs. I'm not holding my breath for Intel to help with that though.

Re: Intel Gears Up for FPGA Push

#46

Post by yvdriess »

AriaMinaei wrote: post #43

In the case of Lisp and Smalltalk and other highly dynamic languages, would these on-die FPGAs open new compiler optimisation opportunities?

The common sentiment after the 90's is that it's hard to beat optimized x86 implementation of both. Maybe non-offloading FPGA-CPU hardware has the potential of accelerating certain language features (e.g. burn in the CLOS method lookup cache?)

Re: Intel Gears Up for FPGA Push

#47

Post by nakedrobot2 »

nimish wrote: post #44

Tooling tooling tooling. FPGA hardware is cool but the tooling fucking sucks. Like stepping back into the time where you needed to pay thousands of dollars to get decent compilers and debuggers. The ability for anyone to develop software for CPUs at zero-cost is an amazing freedom. You literally cannot do that on certain fpgas--not only do they cost thousands, so do the tools to actually create a working design. Unti…

FPGA's are extremely powerful, but the toolchain is absolute dog shit. Xilinx, shame on you. Intel, will you change anything here?

The compound problem of this in reality is that finding the right people who have the right strain of semi-insanity to do this really well, is very slim. And most of them are tied up with a massive salary from some aerospace company such as Raytheon, GE, Honeywell, or someone like Philips (building medical devices).

Add to that compile times of an hour or a day, and you have a glacial development cycle on your hands.

Re: Intel Gears Up for FPGA Push

#49

Post by davrosthedalek »

ngsayjoe wrote: post #31
chisleu wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They bought one of the best hardware makers with one of the worst software platforms. I hope to all that is holy that they replaced the software entirely. What a nightmare those classes were...

Yes Quartus is complete crap! I wrote some of it.

To be fair, Quartus was way ahead of Xilinx' offering until they leap-frogged it with Vivado.

Re: Intel Gears Up for FPGA Push

#50

Post by amelius »

I think Intel or somebody else should put more effort in whetting our appetite for possible applications.

What long list of applications can CPU+FPGA bring us that a CPU or GPU can't?

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