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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

#41

Post by the_pwner224 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #32
SilverBirch wrote: post #23

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.

> I’m so tired of the hardened rubbish and cpu integrated rubbish. Was there actually a way to access a CPU-integrated FPGA as an "ordinary" user/customer (i.e. not a "special customer")?

Yes, the Zynq MPSoCs are widely available on Digikey, Mouser, etc. Both the bare chips as well as dev boards (Avnet ZedBoard, Trenz, and the Xilinx first party dev boards too). Even Versal is available, you can buy a VCK190 (albeit with a long lead time and it's over $10k) and Trenz has some much cheaper stuff which will be more generally available in the near future.

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

#42

Post by tonyarkles »

rthomas6 wrote: post #37
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…

> nobody really wants FPGA fabric on a CPU. Not true... Xilinx sells a lot of their Zynq, MPSoC, and RFSoC chips. Though I guess those are more CPU on an FPGA.

Intel doesn’t really make low end CPUs like that though. The Zynq is an awesome little chip and there really isn’t anything on the market to compare it to as far as I know. From my perspective sitting on the sidelines of this industry, Intel went all-in assuming companies would want FPGAs in the data centre the same way they want GPUs in the data centre and that bet didn’t pan out.

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

#44

Post by numpad0 »

rthomas6 wrote: post #37
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…

> nobody really wants FPGA fabric on a CPU. Not true... Xilinx sells a lot of their Zynq, MPSoC, and RFSoC chips. Though I guess those are more CPU on an FPGA.

Words of mouth I’ve seen on this was that the whole FPGA craze was a war on 5G tower equipment, which AMD/Xilinx took all, and Altera is now a dead weight on Intel.

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

#45

Post by mathisfun123 »

gsmecher wrote: post #27
dralley wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tradit…

> AMD's software roadmap for AI/datacentre leans heavily on Vitis (for software) and AI Engines (as an execution platform).

This is incorrect along all 3 dimensions:

1. AMD has its own data-center class GPUs - I don't know how good they are because I don't work on them

2. Vitis is just a brand and will be taken out of the equation before the end of the year.

3. I don't know what execution platform means because AI Engine is one core in a grid of such cores on the chiplets that are on the Phoenix platform (shipped with new Ryzens) and the VCK boards.

> It's Xilinx technology, but you should expect it to look more like a GPU accelerator than a traditional LUTs-and-routing FPGA.

It is correct that there are no LUTs in the fabric but there are "switchboxes" for data traffic (between cores) and you do have do the routing yourself (or rely on the compiler).

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

#46

Post by brucethemoose2 »

chx wrote: post #29
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…

And thats with a AMD duopoly where, frankly, AMD is happy to be anticompetitive here and there.

A near future with more ARM/RISC-V is very different.

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

#47

Post by PaulHoule »

So many acquisitions end up like this you’d think the shareholders of possible acquiring company might want a “poison pill” or some other mechanism to prevent this kind of merger or maybe the government should make it much much much hardware for companies to merge, mot for the good of the consumer or vendors but for the poor shareholders.

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

#48

Post by throwaway4590 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #39
throwaway4590 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I see talk about Intel's FPGA unit, I link back to an invention I submitted to Intel while I was an intern there [0]. I went through the patent pipeline, but to my knowledge they never did anything with it. This was during the excitement of Intel's original acquisition of Altera. In fairness, I never mocked up a true enough implementation in Verilog to get an idea of real world speedup, and even now, I'm not…

I mean. If you, the original author, didn't even bother implementing and testing the idea why would you expect someone else would? I personally wouldn't touch such a project with a thousand foot pole.

Having worked in both software and hardware, I understand and appreciate this sentiment in software.

But most software engineers don't understand the amount of time and compute that would be required to mock up a novel, yet sufficiently complex as to be realistic, CPU. I did indeed have a basic HDL implementation, as is required for most patents in the US (reduction to practice). But to implement it fully enough to understand what kind of performance changes you could get in a modern CPU... it's safe to estimate it as an order of magnitude harder than the most complex pure software project you've ever built alone, and well beyond the resources of an intern who's just doing this in his spare time. Software is a great gig, because it's easy and you can do it all on your laptop.

And I'm sure computer engineers like myself don't appreciate the difficulty of manufacturing true mechanical hardware at companies like Tesla, where a team and a budget would be even more essential to build anything useful.

Anyway, the technical committee thought it was worth patenting, and the idea itself is pretty digestible without it working on production silicon, but I have no idea who comes up with product roadmaps at Intel. It was probably buried in the patent graveyard, or maybe someone qualified actually looked at it and realized it wouldn't work.

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

#49

Post by hutzlibu »

thenobsta wrote: post #14

Every time I see an FPGA article, I feel a little sad that Tabula[1] didn't make it -- 1.6Ghz clock and reprogrammable on the fly. RIP. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula,_Inc .

What happened with it? Wikipedia is very thin on the details. Did it simply not work out in mass production, or was it not considered worth it anymore as CPU and GPUs advanced?

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

#50

Post by rowanG077 »

throwaway4590 wrote: post #48
rowanG077 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean. If you, the original author, didn't even bother implementing and testing the idea why would you expect someone else would? I personally wouldn't touch such a project with a thousand foot pole.

Having worked in both software and hardware, I understand and appreciate this sentiment in software. But most software engineers don't understand the amount of time and compute that would be required to mock up a novel, yet sufficiently complex as to be realistic, CPU. I did indeed have a basic HDL implementation, as is required for most patents in the US (reduction to practice). But to implement it fully enough to u…

I'm actually a hardware engineer. I disagree that such a thing is only important in Software. You can easily validate any specific idea using cycle accurate simulators. If your intership didn't have enough time then fine. I would expect you continue working on the apparently golden idea your sitting. Nowadays you have a ton of pretty good softcores to choose from to test out an idea.

If the original author of a patent didn't find it worthwhile to pursue the idea for whatever reason I have very little faith in the idea to begin with. Taken to the extreme it's like saying I can turn lead into gold, and then never actually showing you actually making money that way.

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