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AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

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Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#4
post #2

I would quite like an FPGA on board my CPU. Intel have what used to be called Altera, but they don't seem to have done much publicly with it in relation to their CPU business.

The current model for interacting with an FPGA connected to a PC has it sitting on a peripheral card, on the other side of a PCIe bus. AFAIK there's no story for exposing higher level abstractions of these devices though the OS in a way that would allow them to be shared between different applications.

How would you envision an "FPGA on board the CPU" differing from this? Would it still be a separate thing the way GPU is today, or would you see it more as like a new set of CPU instructions which enable little blobs of HDL to be somehow passed in and invoked, kind of like how a shader works today on GPUs?

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#5
post #2

I would quite like an FPGA on board my CPU. Intel have what used to be called Altera, but they don't seem to have done much publicly with it in relation to their CPU business.

The current model for interacting with an FPGA connected to a PC has it sitting on a peripheral card, on the other side of a PCIe bus. AFAIK there's no story for exposing higher level abstractions of these devices though the OS in a way that would allow them to be shared between different applications. How would you envision an "FPGA on board the CPU" differing from this? Would it still be a separate thing the way GP…

There's the possibility of a Xilinx Zynq with AMD x86 cores instead of the ARM cores in current Zynq versions, though I'm not sure that would really be interesting to anyone.

Beyond that, there's been research in the past that envisions using a FPGA fabric as an execution unit within the CPU itself: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/emips/ Intel hasn't pursued such a thing but that doesn't mean AMD couldn't.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#6

I'm unsure if this type of merger is good for consumers. Will AMD and Xilinx make better products together, or does competition drive them more efficiently. I tend to believe the latter.

Probably comes down to whether you believe they compete with eachother. If they do compete, net loss in competition may be bad. If they don't, then two smaller companies gained scale & integration opportunities.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#7
post #6

I'm unsure if this type of merger is good for consumers. Will AMD and Xilinx make better products together, or does competition drive them more efficiently. I tend to believe the latter.

Probably comes down to whether you believe they compete with eachother. If they do compete, net loss in competition may be bad. If they don't, then two smaller companies gained scale & integration opportunities.

Conglomerates aren't particularly better for consumers fwiw

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#9
post #2

I would quite like an FPGA on board my CPU. Intel have what used to be called Altera, but they don't seem to have done much publicly with it in relation to their CPU business.

The current model for interacting with an FPGA connected to a PC has it sitting on a peripheral card, on the other side of a PCIe bus. AFAIK there's no story for exposing higher level abstractions of these devices though the OS in a way that would allow them to be shared between different applications. How would you envision an "FPGA on board the CPU" differing from this? Would it still be a separate thing the way GP…

I think the idea of configurable hdl modules could be very interesting. A game could load a physics core. Ssh could load a security core and so on. These could be updated similar to firmware or even could ship with the application. The only barrier right now is the long programming times.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#10
Has Altera done that well for Intel's bottom line? I haven't been watching that closely.

I would love an RFSOC type peripheral though. Sort of a Spectrum Processing Unit or SPU. If you extrapolate the cu:Signal work to its logical extreme of a purpose built auxiliary processing unit the possibilities are pretty amazing.

[1] https://github.com/rapidsai/cusignal

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