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AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

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Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#61

Post by ksec »

pjmlp wrote: post #59
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #2

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.

PC are only open due to IBM's failure to prevent Compaq's endeveours. If anything, we have seen the whole industry moving back to those days as means to get out of razor thin margins, specially now that desktops are a very niche market for most consumers.

>If anything, we have seen the whole industry moving back to those days as means to get out of razor thin margins,

Yes. It is interesting now that Apple is sort of like the new IBM.

Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#62

Post by ksec »

opportune wrote: post #53
vzidex wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

Why not ship integrated FPGA in CPUs? Being able to offload a repeated, complex MIMD computation to an FPGA treated like an instruction could be a huge win for scientific computing and any large, steady workload that is expensive enough for companies to invest in optimizing for the FPGA. If this became commonplace and relatively inexpensive then large corporations would likely fund improvements into compilers to make…

I just wanted to note Intel tried that and it didn't work. See pjmlp reply.

I still think the idea is sound, the way to go about it needs a lot of rethinking.

Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#63

Post by ksec »

marcofatica wrote: post #52
ZetaZero wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's complicated. The margins on console chips are lower than PC margins. When AMD had spare capacity (GloFo), that was great. But with everyone at TSMC and AMD demand high, those wafers could be used for more profitable chips. But the console deals definitely helped AMD in the dire times. IMO, the strategic error was AMD paying a bunch of cash for ATI, instead of an all stock deal. In 2006, with their stock near the…

AMD still uses GloFo

Only for IOD and some low end APU.

Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#64

Post by floatboth »

throwmeawaysoon wrote: post #50
floatboth wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and some lattice chips Lattice has been by far the favorite of the FOSS community, but there's been more news: - https://github.com/YosysHQ/apicula has appeared for Gowin FPGAs found on e.g. Sipeed Tang Nano boards (very cheap on AliExpress) - a vendor called QuickLogic made SoCs that only use the FOSS toolchain for the FPGA part, out of the box: https://www.quicklogic.com/products/soc/eos-s3-microcontroll...

>Lattice has been by far the favorite of the FOSS community i'm interested in the OSS flows but i haven't dug in yet. so some questions (if you have experience): isn't it only for their ice40 chips? and how smooth is the flow from RTL to bitstream to deploy? one hesitation i have with jumping in is that i'm working on accelerator type stuff, so my designs typically need on the other of 30k-50k LUTs. will yosys+nextpn…

I don't have that much experience (don't really have many use cases for FPGAs personally tbh) but:

Icestorm is for iCE40, Trellis is for ECP5 (which comes in variants up to 85k LUTs);

the flow is simple enough to do manually but there are things that make it one-click. This tutorial series https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEBQazB0HUyT1WmMONxRZn9Nm... uses one.

As for handling really big designs, I don't know.

Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#65

Post by CountSessine »

sitkack wrote: post #46
blihp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I've heard about the Altera deal is that Intel has basically just been milking existing customers, rather than attracting new ones. If AMD does more with Xilinx sooner than they did with ATI[1] it could be good strategic move. If they start making FPGAs standard on their CPUs (short term on the enterprise stuff, longer term on everything) in the same way FPUs are, this could provide them with a significant…

I don’t think the ATI acquisition was an error, integration has been harder than expected. The game concsoles would have been difficult wo having a world class GPU available. The work they did around HSAIL and APUs shows that they have the creativity and the will.

I think integration was always going to be hard and most people who understood the problem knew that it was going to be hard/impossible but they went ahead with it anyways.

At the time they were talking about integrated compute units between CPU and GPU, mapping GPU register space into CPU address space, linking/unlinking CPU and GPU pipelines, etc etc. And the CPU and GPU teams would be working on this while also having to produce top-shelf stand-alone CPUs and GPUs to fight on 2 separate fronts against entrenched and capable competitors. It didn't really seem possible or even desirable at the time.

I also don't understand why having a GPU would improve their chances with console vendors. Those vendors could have still selected AMD CPUs but cut separate deals for the GPU with other companies. This is a business AMD is already and was already in. They do this in all sorts of markets like network switches.

Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#66

Post by sitkack »

CountSessine wrote: post #65
sitkack wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the ATI acquisition was an error, integration has been harder than expected. The game concsoles would have been difficult wo having a world class GPU available. The work they did around HSAIL and APUs shows that they have the creativity and the will.

I think integration was always going to be hard and most people who understood the problem knew that it was going to be hard/impossible but they went ahead with it anyways. At the time they were talking about integrated compute units between CPU and GPU, mapping GPU register space into CPU address space, linking/unlinking CPU and GPU pipelines, etc etc. And the CPU and GPU teams would be working on this while also ha…

Having an existing APU line makes the chances of success a whole lot higher.

I don't know what the grand plans were to have CPU and GPU teams both in a multiple level deep tick tock pipeline (organizations are structured like CPUs or CPUs are structured like assembly lines ... pick your causal metaphor). That would require the right fabric, I don't know if they have that yet. There is a ton of research that shows that a mediocre GPU on the same memory bus as a CPU has a huge number advantages over a GPU on the PCIe bus, even at x16. With HBM, hell put the GPU in the HBM. All HSAIL the HBM!

CPU, GPU and FPGA will all merge into a computational goo. With AMD acquiring Xilinx and their past with APUs and HSA, I stand by my statement. AMD has been stalling on the G series Ryzen parts because I think they don't want to cannibalize their discrete GPU business, but CPUs have more than enough compute and memory bandwidth to support software geometry and rasterization.

https://moorinsightsstrategy.com/the-real-reasons-microsoft-...

Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#67

Post by otherotherchris »

sangnoir wrote: post #57
systemvoltage wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies aren't to blame. Our lawmakers are. They need to pass laws that protect US interests but for last 3 decades, they've sold the American worker's soul to the CCP & private-gov enterprise in China. Apple spent $275 billion to boost Chinese manufacturing, but fuck-all to do anything in US. They could have built a whole ecosystem of US electronics manufacturers and make everything in US + Mexico, but their share…

> They need to pass laws that protect US interests but for last 3 decades, they've sold the American worker's soul to the CCP & private-gov enterprise in China. Companies are not blameless - it's a 2-step process. Lawmakers sold the American worker's soul to capital (companies), and the companies sold them on to China, with a fat markup. The motivations are clear: politicians get donations and cushy jobs, the company…

Typical American narcissism.

The reality is that China's farsighted rulers don't want to be a US client state/ colonial possession and have imposed strict rules on market participants in exchange for access to their 1.5 billion consumer market. American businesses can put up or shut up.

Re: AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

#69

Post by ZetaZero »

wheybags wrote: post #26
ZetaZero wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's complicated. The margins on console chips are lower than PC margins. When AMD had spare capacity (GloFo), that was great. But with everyone at TSMC and AMD demand high, those wafers could be used for more profitable chips. But the console deals definitely helped AMD in the dire times. IMO, the strategic error was AMD paying a bunch of cash for ATI, instead of an all stock deal. In 2006, with their stock near the…

It's possible they offered shares behind closed doors and were turned down though.

Right, but AMD could have issued shares to the public, then paid cash with the proceeds, if ATI insisted. We don't really know what happened.
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