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Intel Shows Xeon Scalable Gold 6138P with Integrated FPGA, Shipping to Vendors

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Re: Intel Shows Xeon Scalable Gold 6138P with Integrated FPGA, Shipping to Vendors

#21

Post by akhilcacharya »

analognoise wrote: post #18
sannee wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> increasingly smaller number and expensive lot of folks. There is this sentiment on HN that people in EE/embedded space don't really get paid well (compared to the average Javascript-slinging frontend dev). Is this not true for HDL folks?

We get paid bank, there are very few of us, and the older you get and the more horror stories you've seen the more you're worth (unlike software). Gray in your beard is a feature, not a flaw. You're responsible for time critical and/or DSP things that are critical system architecture, and will never be outsourced (it's key IP, you'd be stupid to outsource that). Don't let anyone know, we have a good thing going on.

How do you define "bank"?

Re: Intel Shows Xeon Scalable Gold 6138P with Integrated FPGA, Shipping to Vendors

#22

Post by maroonmed »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #21
analognoise wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We get paid bank, there are very few of us, and the older you get and the more horror stories you've seen the more you're worth (unlike software). Gray in your beard is a feature, not a flaw. You're responsible for time critical and/or DSP things that are critical system architecture, and will never be outsourced (it's key IP, you'd be stupid to outsource that). Don't let anyone know, we have a good thing going on.

How do you define "bank"?

tree fiddy * 10^3

Re: Intel Shows Xeon Scalable Gold 6138P with Integrated FPGA, Shipping to Vendors

#23

Post by vba »

analognoise wrote: post #18
sannee wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> increasingly smaller number and expensive lot of folks. There is this sentiment on HN that people in EE/embedded space don't really get paid well (compared to the average Javascript-slinging frontend dev). Is this not true for HDL folks?

We get paid bank, there are very few of us, and the older you get and the more horror stories you've seen the more you're worth (unlike software). Gray in your beard is a feature, not a flaw. You're responsible for time critical and/or DSP things that are critical system architecture, and will never be outsourced (it's key IP, you'd be stupid to outsource that). Don't let anyone know, we have a good thing going on.

interested to hear what bank is here too

Re: Intel Shows Xeon Scalable Gold 6138P with Integrated FPGA, Shipping to Vendors

#24

Post by aseipp »

rjsw wrote: post #6
kev009 wrote: post #4

One stark flailure of the Altera acquisition is there has been little by way of tool chain integration. This is a CPU with a bag on the side, and that bag needs people that write HDL and understand computer architecture to make good use of. It's not really a harsh critique, but a warning that the lower you go is an increasingly smaller number and expensive lot of folks. Intel's marketing arm can't distort that realit…

Learning an HDL isn't that hard. I was productive within a few weeks of starting to use VHDL. A former colleague is now an Altera/Intel FAE, I will ask how things are going the next time we meet up for a beer.

Learning an HDL isn't that hard. But it's a very small part of the overall flow for real development, and arguably it's one of the easier parts anyway... That's sort of the "problem", more or less.

Even very well-oiled products like the Amazon F1 and Intel's new acceleration cards are pretty non-trivial to use unless you're an experienced engineer, and they clearly spent a lot of time polishing off the roughest edges to make it as approachable as possible. Amazon more or less paid a team of seriously experienced people to make the whole flow as painless as possible (including a pretty good software SDK, and a lot of tooling around Vivado), and it's still non-trivial!

Some of the ARM/FPGA combos are a lot more approachable overall, but the tooling, BSPs etc are normally huge pains the moment you want to get creative, and the SDKs are comparatively worse, vs the "high end" ones listed above, in my opinion. Normally I just end up replacing them with my own Linux BSP, more or less, if I need the actual host side.

A really annoying aspect of all this though is that most kits which could offer features like high-speed peripherials (PCIe, etc) are pretty expensive for hobbyist developers to acquire and use, so there's certainly a bit of a self-fulfilling-prophecy going on here.

Re: Intel Shows Xeon Scalable Gold 6138P with Integrated FPGA, Shipping to Vendors

#25

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

rjsw wrote: post #6
kev009 wrote: post #4

One stark flailure of the Altera acquisition is there has been little by way of tool chain integration. This is a CPU with a bag on the side, and that bag needs people that write HDL and understand computer architecture to make good use of. It's not really a harsh critique, but a warning that the lower you go is an increasingly smaller number and expensive lot of folks. Intel's marketing arm can't distort that realit…

Learning an HDL isn't that hard. I was productive within a few weeks of starting to use VHDL. A former colleague is now an Altera/Intel FAE, I will ask how things are going the next time we meet up for a beer.

There are a multitude of foot bullets that you can generate when synthesizing valid HDL to real world hardware. These languages were meant for specification and simulation and as such allow you to do things that are plainly wrong for synthesis in the real world. It's very easy to generate a circuit that works 99.9% of the time and causes Heisenbugs if you approach it like software programming.

Re: Intel Shows Xeon Scalable Gold 6138P with Integrated FPGA, Shipping to Vendors

#26

Post by ktta »

typon wrote: post #16
ktta wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if Intel came up with tools which help make use of the FPGA using higher languages like C. Xilinx is already pushing it's Vivado HLx which is pretty much that. I'm not aware of Altera's current offerings but they won't overlook this so easily.

Altera/Intel has had OpenCL support for years now

OpenCL support is different from this.

Re: Intel Shows Xeon Scalable Gold 6138P with Integrated FPGA, Shipping to Vendors

#27

Post by jayonsoftware »

auvi wrote: post #3

"Price: Arm, Leg" ... hard to miss the sarcasm.

Arria 10 FPGA is kind of mid range, I think they go around for 500 bucks , you can buy the dev board for 5K (https://www.altera.com/products/boards_and_kits/dev-kits/alt...)

Re: Intel Shows Xeon Scalable Gold 6138P with Integrated FPGA, Shipping to Vendors

#29

Post by ktta »

duskwuff wrote: post #12
ktta wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if Intel came up with tools which help make use of the FPGA using higher languages like C. Xilinx is already pushing it's Vivado HLx which is pretty much that. I'm not aware of Altera's current offerings but they won't overlook this so easily.

Intel/Altera has HLS tools as well: https://www.altera.com/products/design-software/high-level-d...

Well there you go. So GP's concerns are largely addressed. Intel can just work on this tooling, and people who are going to use HDL are going to continue using them.

Re: Intel Shows Xeon Scalable Gold 6138P with Integrated FPGA, Shipping to Vendors

#30

Post by wahern »

analognoise wrote: post #18
sannee wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> increasingly smaller number and expensive lot of folks. There is this sentiment on HN that people in EE/embedded space don't really get paid well (compared to the average Javascript-slinging frontend dev). Is this not true for HDL folks?

We get paid bank, there are very few of us, and the older you get and the more horror stories you've seen the more you're worth (unlike software). Gray in your beard is a feature, not a flaw. You're responsible for time critical and/or DSP things that are critical system architecture, and will never be outsourced (it's key IP, you'd be stupid to outsource that). Don't let anyone know, we have a good thing going on.

> it's key IP, you'd be stupid to outsource that

That doesn't usually stop companies. At best it creates an opening for new companies to recapture some high-value markets once the dust from the off-shoring stampede settles.

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