Is it still very difficult for generic programmers to program an FPGA for their particular application?
Intel announces new FPGA families
51–60 of 70 posts
Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xilinx keeps advertising the bejeesus out of their AI p&r, but I haven't touched these tools in years -- how much do the claims translate to reality?
Considering my experience with Xilinx, the more they advertise it the harder it sucks.
Xilinx design tools are some of the buggiest pieces of software known to humankind. Altera(Intel) not far behind.
Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#53I want to write an open source FPGA synthesizer so badly.
Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#54Is it still very difficult for generic programmers to program an FPGA for their particular application?
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Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering my experience with Xilinx, the more they advertise it the harder it sucks.
Xilinx design tools are some of the buggiest pieces of software known to humankind. Altera(Intel) not far behind.
This applies to basically all electronics design tools. Insanely expensive ($5-100k per seat per year is common) and insanely buggy.
Altium, considered one of the best PCB cad tools, hard crashes for me every hour or two of design work I do.
Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#56Following Altera acquisition by Intel, and Xilinx acquisition by AMD, perspectives for many FPGA designers were gloom. There was a general feeling that the two biggies would go to a road where the FPGA is only and add-on or coprocessor for CPU workhorses, for applications like Data centers and ML acceleration. Well, according to these news from Intel, that's not the case. Intle announces new mid-level FPGAs and even…
I share(d) that concern. Mitigating this is that a lot of (low to mid range) alternatives seems to have gotten steam: Lattice Semi, Efinix, Gowin, and more that I forget at the moment. I'm rooting strongly for the underdogs to become viable alternatives to the current duopoly. It would of course have been preferable for any of them to directly support the open stack (yosys, nextpnr, and the various bitstream generato…
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Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
You would easily eventually get into volumes of 2-3 million a year if you could get something out which is powerful enough for PS2 level re-creation. The MiSTER project is already inspiring a generation to learn how to program FPGAs, those skills could be applied to improve performance in a lot of applications.
Yes, but recreating the PS2 is an order of magnitude more complicated than a PS1, which is still a massive undertaking for an individual. Even supposing we had a cheap enough FPGA, who would write the HDL to simulate a PS2?
The ps1 cpu was just a mips. Building a mips cpu with an fpga is a normal required undergrad project for a cs degree or it was a couple decades ago. I was feeling dismissive until I looked at the specs for the gpu and spu... That was some serious work for the ps1. The ps2 had that odd cell processor, or emotion engine whatever you want to call it. Its still basically multiple simplified mips cores but now all the stuff to synchronize them correctly? I'm surprised the ps2 emulators are as close as they are. Doing it all in hdl, and with the upgraded gpu, that is enough work that I wonder if software emulation fidelity wouldn't reach hardware fidelity before the fpga design did.
Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if the war has anything to do with this actually. These chips and some larger STM32 like F7 and H7 are dual use and can be used in missiles and drones. I couldn't buy the car manufacturers' excuse. I think MICs around the world have been stockpiling these chips.
Raspberry Pis too. The shortage feels targeted. Or I’m just being an idiot as always.
Pine64 has some pretty nice ARM (and fairly priced) boards that seem to be in stock. Maybe one of those will suffice for your application?
Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#59I see a lot of use of FPGAs in things like cutting-edge machinery, warfare, and stock trading. Are there any cool hobbyist uses of these things? Always game to learn a new tech.
When would a hobbyist need processing much faster than a modern beefy CPU provides, but not in a highly parallel fashion which a modern GPU provides? My only relatively reasonable suggestion is making perfect hardware emulators for old hardware, like vintage computers and their parts. Alas, FPGA programming model is neither easy nor intuitive, and the tools are mostly proprietary, expensive, and (as I heard) have a s…
Not just emulators. You can do nifty things, like redirect RAM reads and writes to a different location, save states, freeze the CPU, feed it with a different ROM (bypassing the one in your board), etc.
Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#60The announcement is surprisingly lacking in architectural updates; it looks like the same Agilex on a new process. Has Intel killed innovation? ADD: last time I witnessed something actually new and interesting: https://www.efinixinc.com/technology.html
FPGA innovation is very incremental. The hyperflex architecture is basically the single biggest innovation in FPGA fabric, and it basically didn’t pay off. Altera also smashed up against the wall of Intel 10nm. So all in all, some reduced precision for AI and some EMIB enabled stuff isn’t too bad.