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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

#51

Post by glitchc »

tonyarkles wrote: post #42
rthomas6 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sounds like intel is mismanaged.

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

#52

Post by FullyFunctional »

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 .

I was a huge fan of the concept (time slicing LUTs). The name "Space-Time" actually made sense. Unfortunately, mapping designs to regular FPGA fabric is already hard and it apparently was too difficult for the Space-Time fabric and thus they folded.

There are a lot of open FPGA efforts around. I hope someone else gives the idea another shot.

While we are on exotic approaches, Achronix' first generation was using an asynchronous (1 GHz) fabric. I regret I didn't get a chance to play with that before the pivoted to a conventional fabric.

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

#53

Post by FullyFunctional »

hutzlibu wrote: post #49
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?

My moles claim they simply couldn't get the software to work.

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

#54

Post by mikepavone »

tonyarkles wrote: post #42
rthomas6 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Intel does have the Cyclone 5 SoC which integrates Cortex-A9 cores much like the Zynq 7000 series. That product predates the acquisition though and they don't seem to have released anything to compete with newer entries in the Zynq lineup

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

#55

Post by hobs »

throwaway4590 wrote: post #12
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…

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…

Isn't it silly to link a throwaway account to a patent you invented? :)

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

#56

Post by throwaway4590 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #50
throwaway4590 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 paten…

> I'm actually a hardware engineer. You can easily validate any specific idea using cycle accurate simulators

If anything, I'm less convinced than before that you understand how complex a modern CPU is. Perhaps you can re-read my comment; I essentially did what you are suggesting, but that wasn't enough, in my opinion, to glean any information about benchmarks in the real world. It took hundreds of hours. To make it slightly more realistic but still woefully inaccurate using licensable IP's and my own time/money without the company's buy-in seems absurd, even to the most stubborn HN commenter. The fact that we are modifying the L1/L2/L3 structure (perhaps you also didn't read the patent before commenting) makes this essentially re-designing large parts of the CPU from the ground up, at least as far as I understand licensable core IP.

> I would expect you continue working on the apparently golden idea your sitting

Why? No one ever said it was the golden idea. Only that I found it interesting. Apologies if my optimistic curiosity triggered your defenses.

Regardless, your statement makes no sense for other reasons. Perhaps there's a cultural gap (are you not American?). Here are some relevant points about US companies and patents I hope I can help you understand:

1. Big US corporations will patent anything novel, technical, and remotely related to the business as a means of protecting themselves against litigation. Most of these patents only see an initial technical committee, lawyers, and then are never seen again.

2. Inventors have zero individual rights to their patents when patented via company channels (in exchange, the company pays for the lawyers and usually grants a tiny stipend).

3. Interns typically do not influence how research budgets are allocated.

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

#57

Post by throwaway4590 »

hobs wrote: post #55
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…

Isn't it silly to link a throwaway account to a patent you invented? :)

A bit unorthodox to have a public throwaway and an anonymous-ish main account, I suppose ;)

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

#58

Post by coryrc »

mikewarot wrote: post #15
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…

The right kind of sea of LUTs can outperform anything even if it's clocked at 100 Mhz... the trick is to get a pipeline filled, instead of trying to outrun light. Imagine an LLM with a new token every 10 nS

But you can't fit that "sea" into a processor core as a separate unit powered by unique instructions (like an FPU or ALU) because the speed demands the cache and ALU be there (or else it can't run at 3GHz any more). Once it's not that close it doesn't make sense to be on the same chip; maybe a neighboring chiplet. But anybody could do that.

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

#59

Post by yarg »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #25
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.…

Any use at NVidia for that tech? If the biggest problem is process, Altera should be shopping around for a company with an in on manufacturing at TSMC. (I doubt AMD's an option, since they already subsumed Xilinx.)

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

#60

Post by ethbr1 »

glitchc wrote: post #51
tonyarkles wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like intel is mismanaged.

It certainly was. It remains to be seen if it is.

If they'd been made a performant (as in, non-x86) low-end CPU, then they wouldn't have lost mobile and be competing with ARM now.

Intel of the past few decades learned the wrong lesson from their history. You can climb the value chain to riches, but once you're at the top you still need to seed the earth for the next generation of profits. And that means cheap entry points and volume.

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