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Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

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Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#71

Post by chx »

dTal wrote: post #70
kristianp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Lenovo Thinkpad T480 has an M.2 slot and a normal SATA bay. If you order with an NVMe SSD, it goes in a caddy with an adapter in the SATA bay. The M.2 slot is optionally used for WAN or a small secondary SSD. However is is only 42 mm long and PCIe only, so third party SSDs are difficult to find. I only know all this because I just bought one, and have been hunting for something useful to put in that slot...

Sigh. There is no such thing as an "M.2 slot". There is always a key and a size. The T480 has three M.2 slots:

1. Optional M.2 key M 2280 in the main bay via an adapter.

2. M.2 key B 2242, the Lite On T11 works there for an SSD. It's the only consumer M>2 key B+M 2242 PCIe SSD. This generation doesn't support SATA disks in this slot, the T470 did.

3. M.2 key E 2230 as practically all laptops do since Broadwell for wifi.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#72

Post by cbHXBY1D »

thesz wrote: post #49
pjc50 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have more than enough resources for video encoding, because all modern codecs have a macroblock structure. You don't need to keep the whole current frame in at once, you can slide a window around it. (Conversely, you do need to keep the matching area of the previous frame and maybe even the next frame in order to do proper inter-prediction). That said I would assume GPUs are more suited to this task. By FPGA stan…

You are also limited by number of access paths into the memory which holds, say, macroblock. I forgot about this issue, sorry. For block RAM in previous generation FPGAs from Altera there were one read and one write paths. To have two read paths you would need to copy block RAM as many times as you need read paths. This means that if you search for block content inside a macroblock with N parallel accesses you would…

Such a shame that Tabula closed down. They had some of the most interesting tech -- hopefully someone is able to pick it up someday. As someone who works with FPGAs, I think a solution like theirs is the only way FPGAs will become mainstream.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#73

Post by dTal »

chx wrote: post #71
dTal wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Lenovo Thinkpad T480 has an M.2 slot and a normal SATA bay. If you order with an NVMe SSD, it goes in a caddy with an adapter in the SATA bay. The M.2 slot is optionally used for WAN or a small secondary SSD. However is is only 42 mm long and PCIe only, so third party SSDs are difficult to find. I only know all this because I just bought one, and have been hunting for something useful to put in that slot...

Sigh. There is no such thing as an "M.2 slot". There is always a key and a size. The T480 has three M.2 slots: 1. Optional M.2 key M 2280 in the main bay via an adapter. 2. M.2 key B 2242, the Lite On T11 works there for an SSD. It's the only consumer M>2 key B+M 2242 PCIe SSD. This generation doesn't support SATA disks in this slot, the T470 did. 3. M.2 key E 2230 as practically all laptops do since Broadwell for wi…

Bugger. So the FPGA card won't work then. Thanks for explaining.

It's all very confusing and frustrating. So the chances of me finding anything useful to put in that slot are roughly nil, then? I can see no physical or technical reason why my slot should not support this card, except that the card only supports two out of the three possible PCIe-carrying configurations, and I was unlucky. Seems like a poorly designed "standard".

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#74

Post by chx »

dTal wrote: post #73
chx wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. There is no such thing as an "M.2 slot". There is always a key and a size. The T480 has three M.2 slots: 1. Optional M.2 key M 2280 in the main bay via an adapter. 2. M.2 key B 2242, the Lite On T11 works there for an SSD. It's the only consumer M>2 key B+M 2242 PCIe SSD. This generation doesn't support SATA disks in this slot, the T470 did. 3. M.2 key E 2230 as practically all laptops do since Broadwell for wi…

Bugger. So the FPGA card won't work then. Thanks for explaining. It's all very confusing and frustrating. So the chances of me finding anything useful to put in that slot are roughly nil, then? I can see no physical or technical reason why my slot should not support this card, except that the card only supports two out of the three possible PCIe-carrying configurations, and I was unlucky. Seems like a poorly designed…

Of course it will work! That's the point: remove the wifi card and use a USB dongle instead. Practically every laptop featuring a Broadwell or later CPU will work.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#75

Post by dTal »

chx wrote: post #74
dTal wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bugger. So the FPGA card won't work then. Thanks for explaining. It's all very confusing and frustrating. So the chances of me finding anything useful to put in that slot are roughly nil, then? I can see no physical or technical reason why my slot should not support this card, except that the card only supports two out of the three possible PCIe-carrying configurations, and I was unlucky. Seems like a poorly designed…

Of course it will work! That's the point: remove the wifi card and use a USB dongle instead. Practically every laptop featuring a Broadwell or later CPU will work.

I meant in my spare, useless 'key B' slot, which will still be spare and useless if I take the wifi card out.

It especially rankles because they devoted two whole PCIe lanes to that damn slot, which would be better put to use unbottlenecking my highly expensive Samsung P981 NVMe drive.

The T480s does not suffer this problem.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#76

Post by chx »

dTal wrote: post #75
chx wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it will work! That's the point: remove the wifi card and use a USB dongle instead. Practically every laptop featuring a Broadwell or later CPU will work.

I meant in my spare, useless 'key B' slot, which will still be spare and useless if I take the wifi card out. It especially rankles because they devoted two whole PCIe lanes to that damn slot, which would be better put to use unbottlenecking my highly expensive Samsung P981 NVMe drive. The T480s does not suffer this problem.

The T480 is almost a T470 and unbottlenecking said drive would've required a motherboard redesign and a new adapter into the bay. Not this generation. The T470 was a completely new design, chassis and planar both.

The T480s is a new machine.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#77

Post by baybal2 »

bogomipz wrote: post #52
baybal2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>"At the moment, I am involved with one cloud provider in China that bids big on cheap FPGAs and RDMA. AWS and Azures can be defeated in detail." Can you share how this FPGA and RDMA combination works architecturally? What's the software stack composed of? Might you have any links or other resources you could share?

Made almost entirely in house.

You provision access over in-dc REST api, then rdma capable routers route the appliance to your vm, then you access it through provided libs for linux.

In other words, you don't deal with RDMA yourself at any moment

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#79

Post by nxmehta »

cbHXBY1D wrote: post #72
thesz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are also limited by number of access paths into the memory which holds, say, macroblock. I forgot about this issue, sorry. For block RAM in previous generation FPGAs from Altera there were one read and one write paths. To have two read paths you would need to copy block RAM as many times as you need read paths. This means that if you search for block content inside a macroblock with N parallel accesses you would…

Such a shame that Tabula closed down. They had some of the most interesting tech -- hopefully someone is able to pick it up someday. As someone who works with FPGAs, I think a solution like theirs is the only way FPGAs will become mainstream.

Altera took many of the employees (although quite a few are now at AWS) and it's rumored they also bought the IP. A lot of the core ideas will live on in Stratix, hopefully.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#80

Post by meuk »

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.

I think they did exactly that with Amazon AWS instances (although I have to admit that I don't know the specifics).
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