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Intel to set its FPGA unit free to pursue its own path

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Re: Intel to set its FPGA unit free to pursue its own path

#21

Post by amluto »

almatabata wrote: post #3

Damn i hoped we would one day get a customizable fpga into our CPUs. I hoped that it would make sense to install certain instructions on your fpga depending on your workloads. I guess this either kills that possibility or pushes it into a very far future. I do not understand this part though: > There was talk of hybrid CPU-FPGA packages, which never seem to get > commercialized because no system architect likes stati…

Integrating an FPGA with the actual front-end and register files seems so you can invoke it synchronously, with fast instructions at low latency, seems neat but rather complicated. As for an FPGA asynchronously accessing application memory, I tentatively expect CXL with some shared virtual memory trickery to succeed in this space, at least in a couple years when the dust hopefully settles, and then you can do whatever you want.

Re: Intel to set its FPGA unit free to pursue its own path

#22

Post by dralley »

almatabata wrote: post #3

Damn i hoped we would one day get a customizable fpga into our CPUs. I hoped that it would make sense to install certain instructions on your fpga depending on your workloads. I guess this either kills that possibility or pushes it into a very far future. I do not understand this part though: > There was talk of hybrid CPU-FPGA packages, which never seem to get > commercialized because no system architect likes stati…

> Damn i hoped we would one day get a customizable fpga into our CPUs. I hoped that it would make sense to install certain instructions on your fpga depending on your workloads. I guess this either kills that possibility or pushes it into a very far future.

Depends on what AMD does with Xilinx.

Re: Intel to set its FPGA unit free to pursue its own path

#23

Post by SilverBirch »

Yeah it was really funny watching Intel buy Altera at the same time that they were spinning out McAfee and thinking “well we’ll see how long this lasts…”

Big chunk of the team from Altera are at AMD now anyway.

Hopefully they finally get back to innovating on the actual FPGA now. I’m so tired of the hardened rubbish and cpu integrated rubbish.

Re: Intel to set its FPGA unit free to pursue its own path

#24

Post by SilverBirch »

tester756 wrote: post #20

It will hurt them on earnings in 2024? What they gain from it? Is there some deal with TSMC behind the scenes? It seems like TSMC is investing in some Intel's companies IMS and now this

They’re just dumping the distraction from their core business, the Altera acquisition was one of Bryan krzanich’s many mid-steps, buying and betting instead of running a business.

Re: Intel to set its FPGA unit free to pursue its own path

#25

Post by Tuna-Fish »

mips_r4300i wrote: post #9

Thank goodness. I've been expecting this ever since Intel bought Altera, they just stuck with it a couple years longer than I figured. They focused solely on the high end, but it turns out nobody really wants FPGA fabric on a CPU. You can already do acceleration over a PCI express link, and that's what you more often do with embedded applications where the CPU is acting more like a dispatch controller than doing the…

They did not ignore the low end by choice.

The entire story of Altera inside Intel can be summarized as:

Intel fabs make amazing promises about process performance and availability. Altera builds their product stack on that. In the end, the fabs fail to deliver either performance, or sufficient amount of manufacturing capability. Now Altera has to pick which products they want to ship. They obviously can the low end. Even the high end that ships is horribly late, because of manufacturing issues.

There would have been massive demand for the combined Intel+Altera products. Many large customers built their future based on the marketing promises Intel made, and when they couldn't deliver, those customers had to redevelop everything on something else. As an example, look up Nokia Reefshark.

Re: Intel to set its FPGA unit free to pursue its own path

#27

Post by gsmecher »

dralley wrote: post #22
almatabata wrote: post #3

Damn i hoped we would one day get a customizable fpga into our CPUs. I hoped that it would make sense to install certain instructions on your fpga depending on your workloads. I guess this either kills that possibility or pushes it into a very far future. I do not understand this part though: > There was talk of hybrid CPU-FPGA packages, which never seem to get > commercialized because no system architect likes stati…

> Damn i hoped we would one day get a customizable fpga into our CPUs. I hoped that it would make sense to install certain instructions on your fpga depending on your workloads. I guess this either kills that possibility or pushes it into a very far future. Depends on what AMD does with Xilinx.

> Depends on what AMD does with Xilinx.

Currently the AMD/Xilinx dynamic seems to reverse this: "Depends on what Xilinx does with AMD".

AMD's software roadmap for AI/datacentre leans heavily on Vitis (for software) and AI Engines (as an execution platform). CPUs that integrate AI engines are already shipping (Ryzen AI). It's Xilinx technology, but you should expect it to look more like a GPU accelerator than a traditional LUTs-and-routing FPGA. And, as duskwuff have pointed out, this sucks a lot of the oxygen out of the CPU-with-FPGA design space.

Re: Intel to set its FPGA unit free to pursue its own path

#28

Post by imtringued »

j_not_j wrote: post #17
tverbeure wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hoped that it would make sense to install certain instructions on your fpga depending on your workloads. It's one of those things that seem like a good idea, but they just don't work out in practice. FPGA LUTs are just way too slow. You'd have to find a case where doing something on a 3GHz CPU clock running multiple instruction parallel gets outperformed by LUTs that runs at 700MHz (at best). And when you cascade…

> FPGA LUTs are just way too slow If, and of course that is a big if, you can repackage a (parallelizable) calculation into FPGA look-up tables and implement multiples of this (e.g. 8 to 80 times) then you can think maybe it's quicker than CPU at 3GHz. However, you have to include DMA of the data to and fro. It's unlikely to be worth the very extensive effort of integrating two wildly different technologies. On the o…

>However, you have to include DMA of the data to and fro. It's unlikely to be worth the very extensive effort of integrating two wildly different technologies.

That is exactly the part where having the FPGA next to the CPU helps... You can transparently access the CPU cache via an AXI slave port on the CPU on AMD's MPSoCs at a rate of up to 16 bytes per cycle and you get multiple of those.

Re: Intel to set its FPGA unit free to pursue its own path

#29

Post by chx »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #2

> We wouldn’t place heavy bets on Falcon Shores making it to completion unless a big HPC center adopts it, and given how Argonne National Laboratory was treated, we don’t think there will be a lot of uptake unless Intel makes some pretty big pricing concessions. Which it can ill afford. Hybrid CPU-GPU devices – the original plan for Falcon Shores, have also been shelved. That's even more eyebrow raising than an Alter…

Look at https://benchmark.chaos.com/v5/vray?index=1&ordering=desc&by... Intel can ill afford to think about forever. They have a runway built by illegal monopoly tactics. What that runway ends, the music stops unless they do something very drastic to their CPUs right now. In the V-Ray 5 benchmark, the fastest 96 core AMD CPU alone is 30% faster than the fastest Intel offering, 120 cores in two sockets -- and that's not the fastest CPU AMD offers.

This is not to say Intel will go bankrupt look at the number of quarters AMD spent in red but it really doesn't want to become #2.

Re: Intel to set its FPGA unit free to pursue its own path

#30

Post by imtringued »

dralley wrote: post #22
almatabata wrote: post #3

Damn i hoped we would one day get a customizable fpga into our CPUs. I hoped that it would make sense to install certain instructions on your fpga depending on your workloads. I guess this either kills that possibility or pushes it into a very far future. I do not understand this part though: > There was talk of hybrid CPU-FPGA packages, which never seem to get > commercialized because no system architect likes stati…

> Damn i hoped we would one day get a customizable fpga into our CPUs. I hoped that it would make sense to install certain instructions on your fpga depending on your workloads. I guess this either kills that possibility or pushes it into a very far future. Depends on what AMD does with Xilinx.

I am actually surprised how AMD managed to successfully leverage it's FPGAs for machine learning inference. It is competing with Nvidia's Jetson.
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