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AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

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Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#11

Why? Has Intel done anything with Altera? I’m curious. AMD’s acquisition of ATI is generally viewed as a strategic error. Does this make more sense?

> AMD’s acquisition of ATI is generally viewed as a strategic error.

Historically it was (when AMD was drowning in debt from the acquisition and had no competitive processors on the timeline), but is this still true? For instance, all of the major game consoles (ps4/ps5/xbone/xbox series x/switch) use AMD boards, and as I recall, those deals lifted the company's financials quite well.

Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#12

Why? Has Intel done anything with Altera? I’m curious. AMD’s acquisition of ATI is generally viewed as a strategic error. Does this make more sense?

Is it still? I thought the ability to produce semi-custom APUs for game consoles more or less saved AMD when they were unable to compete in the CPU market.

Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah a co processor with fpga on it or even an expansion card I can buy at micro center for 100 bucks would be great!

Or even better, a useful FPGA that is inside the Ryzen processor itself. It might be very small, but if it was standardized, had an easier way to program it, and programs could load acceleration routines into it, that would be so cool.

Intel has done the equivalent with some Xeon processors.

The chiplet design of current AMD CPUs should make this even easier to do.

Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#14
post #11

Why? Has Intel done anything with Altera? I’m curious. AMD’s acquisition of ATI is generally viewed as a strategic error. Does this make more sense?

> AMD’s acquisition of ATI is generally viewed as a strategic error. Historically it was (when AMD was drowning in debt from the acquisition and had no competitive processors on the timeline), but is this still true? For instance, all of the major game consoles (ps4/ps5/xbone/xbox series x/switch) use AMD boards, and as I recall, those deals lifted the company's financials quite well.

Agreed, although Switch uses NVidia Tegra, not AMD this generation.

Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#15

Why? Has Intel done anything with Altera? I’m curious. AMD’s acquisition of ATI is generally viewed as a strategic error. Does this make more sense?

I see it as a data center play. SmartNic, DPU, etc. I'd love to play with a FPGA co-processor in my workstation, but I doubt that is the goal.

Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#16

If I have one wish for AMD, I wish that they would make FPGAs (and Xilinx) a more open and diverse platform like the PC. Not that the PC is perfect (there's still closed-source firmware), but any improvement to the current state of FPGAs would be welcomed.

You've struck on the fundamental problem that the FPGA industry has been trying to solve for 30+ years - how to get an FPGA into the hands of every developer, like how GPUs have propagated to be essential tools.

Nobody has come up with a good answer yet. Developing for an FPGA still requires domain-specific knowledge, and because place & route (the "compile" for an FPGA) is a couple of intertwined NP-hard problems development cycles are necessarily long. Small designs might take an hour to compile, the largest designs deployed these days ~24H.

All this to say is that while they are neat, nobody has found the magic bullet use case that will make everyone want one enough to put up with the pain of developing for them (a la machine learning for GPUs). Simultaneously, nobody has found the magic bullet to make developing for them any easier, whether by reducing the knowledge required or improving the tooling.

Effort has been made in places like High-Level Synthesis (HLS, compiling C/C++ code down to an FPGA), open-source tooling, and (everyone's favorite) simulation, but they all still kinda suck compared to developing software, or even the ecosystem that exists around GPUs these days. You'll often hear FPGA people saying stuff like "just simulate your design during development, compiling to hardware is just a last step to check everything works" - but simulation still takes a long time (large designs can take hours) and tracking down a bug in waveforms is akin to Neo learning to see the Matrix.

Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#17

Why? Has Intel done anything with Altera? I’m curious. AMD’s acquisition of ATI is generally viewed as a strategic error. Does this make more sense?

> Has Intel done anything with Altera? I’m curious.

To me Intel taking over Altera and removing the Altera name was a mistake. I don't associate the name "Intel" with FPGA's nor do I think they have a real interest in them beyond server acceleration. To me, Altera and their product line are dead.

I don't know what AMD will do to Xilinx but I hope it isn't more of the same hype driven nonsense of ML/AI/Crypto/Cloud chasing. And it will be sad to see the Xilinx name disappear.

Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#18
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AMD’s acquisition of ATI is generally viewed as a strategic error. Historically it was (when AMD was drowning in debt from the acquisition and had no competitive processors on the timeline), but is this still true? For instance, all of the major game consoles (ps4/ps5/xbone/xbox series x/switch) use AMD boards, and as I recall, those deals lifted the company's financials quite well.

Agreed, although Switch uses NVidia Tegra, not AMD this generation.

For now they do, honestly it would make more sense to maybe consider an AMD SoC.

Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#19
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AMD’s acquisition of ATI is generally viewed as a strategic error. Historically it was (when AMD was drowning in debt from the acquisition and had no competitive processors on the timeline), but is this still true? For instance, all of the major game consoles (ps4/ps5/xbone/xbox series x/switch) use AMD boards, and as I recall, those deals lifted the company's financials quite well.

Agreed, although Switch uses NVidia Tegra, not AMD this generation.

Ah, sorry, my mistake!
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