Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

fpgaer.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 81 posts

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#21

Post by baybal2 »

sddfd wrote: post #12

This is great! I think that some time in the future, FPGA will be a vital part for data processing. In theory, an application with a computation-heavy task could program the FPGA to provide part of that task in hardware (think the hot innermost loop body). What I am worried about is the infrastructure that is needed to make this happen: Is there even support for this in our compilers? What would support look like?

There is software that can poorly map OpenCL calls onto HDL code. It is still light years behind a human designer.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#22

Post by ksec »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #5
quadruplebond wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure that Phi as you know it is largely being left. Argonne's Aurora exascale machine was suppose to be Xeon Phi, but it has been postponed till 2021 and will likely use some other tech. Also look at the top 500 list from late 2017. Trinity the NNSA computer at #7 is Phi based but only gets about 50% of theoretical peak.

My personal tinfoil hat take is that Xeon Phi was made to make China waste top dollar on their supercomputers going with a less useful accelerator made by a US company.

By wasting millions of dollar and literally gave the Phi for free to China, which is part of the Intel CPU deal?

The answer is rather simple. Xeon Phi wasn't as good as the GPU counterpart.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#24

Post by thesz »

Keyframe wrote: post #23

Depending on the price, this will be interesting for I/do-something/O workloads like video encoding/decoding. Depending on the price, looking forward to it. Of course, depending on the price. :)

You won't have enough resources for video encoding, most probably. Arria 10 FPGA has 67M bits of memory total (8.5M bytes), including one simulated with registers. As far as I remember, just storing 1920x1080 (HD) frame in 4:2:0 mode would require 4M bytes, half of memory. 4K would require 4 times as much resources.

You may do some on-line processing like running neural net on the video content, but that's about it. Don't expect anything super exciting from that chip.

Yet, it will bring joy to high frequency traders. The systems there do most of the work in FPGA, including UDP/TCP/IP packets processing and offload some work to CPU (broadcasts about network topology are handled on CPU, for example). They also would like to receive CPU computation results as fast as they can and this chip is exactly that.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#25

Post by qubex »

sddfd wrote: post #12

This is great! I think that some time in the future, FPGA will be a vital part for data processing. In theory, an application with a computation-heavy task could program the FPGA to provide part of that task in hardware (think the hot innermost loop body). What I am worried about is the infrastructure that is needed to make this happen: Is there even support for this in our compilers? What would support look like?

Back in the mid-to-late nineties, Federico Faggin, designer of Intel's seminal 4004 (and ancestor of the whole x86 lineage) co-founded a company called Starbridge Systems that aimed to construct and sell what they termed hypercomputers whose architecture was rapidly-reconfiguring FPGAs that an enabled a compile-to-hardware model.

Here's one of the few references to that project that I can now find online, a WIRED era piece with all the gushing nerd optimism of the pre-dot-com-bust: https://www.wired.com/1999/02/the-super-duper-hypercomputer/

I suppose this is where Intel is headed now with these first few tentative steps.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#26

Post by alde »

exikyut wrote: post #17
meuk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is called high-level synthesis and there are some tools for this available (and I know at least one company who produces a proprietary toolchain - including hardware - for this). In my experience, high-level synthesis makes things a lot easier for the programmer, but you still have to be aware of very low-level details (and you still can get bitten by abstractions that you don't fully understand).

That company might fruitfully make their system available within a datacenter / "VPS"-type context, eg the way Cloud9 does it. ( https://c9.io/ , you make a free account, you instantly get a Web based editor connected to a Debian VM) If their system accepts "mostly ordinary" code in eg C, a fair amount of stuff would probably work with it, so it could scale beyond educational exploration/tinkering, too.

Here is a service I know of: https://reconfigure.io/

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#27

Post by guiriduro »

baybal2 wrote: post #20
mtgx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a weak benefit. I don't think the fpga part will be cheap. In fact it will probably be significantly more expensive than the CPU. So then why not buy a chip with twice the cores if running twice the VMs is what you want to do with it? Also you can buy an AMD EPYC chip with twice the cores for about the same price you'd pay only for the CPU part of this chip/half the intel cores.

>Also you can buy an AMD EPYC chip with twice the cores for about the same price you'd pay only for the CPU part of this chip/half the intel cores. Indeed. What benefits the most from being turned into FPGA circuit are stateless or minimally stateful circuits like media decoders/encoders. Complex stuff like fancy routers, classifiers, internet protocol inspection/handling will not gain a hundredfold speedup unlike th…

Pretty sure AWS has had f1 instances for some time already.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#28

Post by kristianp »

chx wrote: post #15

On a whole different level, if you are merely interested in FPGAs in your computer then the PicoEVB neatly goes in the same M.2 slot as wifi cards do and communicates over PCIe, even if just PCIe Gen 2 x1. As far as I am aware this is, by far, the cheapest way to get an FPGA on the PCIe bus.

Don't new laptops only have one of those, for their hard drives?

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#29

Post by sannee »

arcanus wrote: post #2

Could this be a hint at Intel's supercomputing and AI strategy? They cannot compete with GPUs on flops with Xeon, but an embedded FPGA might get them closer. It is a risky strategy however. Even if they can attain similar performance, which I doubt, programmability remains the big problem for FPGAs. I know Intel is pushing openCL but it simply does not have an ecosystem for software right now, and it remains to be se…

> They cannot compete with GPUs on flops with Xeon, but an embedded FPGA might get them closer.

FPGAs aren't known for their FLOPs though. Sure, the high end ones pack a punch, but compared to GPUs are still extremely expensive.

Post reply on HN