What are some killer apps for FPGAs? What major products do they enable?
Ultra-accurate classic computer and videogame emulators!
It's not so much about accuracy as the low-latency video output (and at the correct refresh rate).
AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family
21–30 of 90 posts
Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family
#22What are some killer apps for FPGAs? What major products do they enable?
They enable a bunch of niches (some of which do have a large impact), as opposed to having a few high-volume uses. Basically anything where you really need an ASIC but you don't have the volume to justify an ASIC (and also have the requires large margins for such a product to be viable). Custom RF protocols, the ASIC development process itself, super-low-latency but complex control loops in big motor drives, that kin…
What you're describing is correct for the top-end FPGA products (they're in every 5G base station, and almost every data centre has thousands of them rerouting information), but the low-end ($10 or less) 2k LE FPGAs are in a hell of a lot of products now too. They're fantastic for anything where you need a lot of logic that executes immediately/concurrently (vs sequentially as would with a microcontroller) in a tiny package. Think medical devices, robotics, comms devices, instrumentation, or power controllers.
I'm pretty sure there's an FPGA in most consumer devices now, but as you say they're there for some sort of glue logic - but that's a killer niche unto itself. Schematics can shift and change throughout a design cycle, and you only need to rewrite some HDL rather than go hunting for a different ASIC that's fit for purpose. It's a growing field again as their cost has come right down. They're in the Apple Vision headset, the Steam Deck, modern TVs, and a host of small form factor consumer computing products.
Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family
#23What are some killer apps for FPGAs? What major products do they enable?
Low-latency (e.g. less than 20 lines) Videoswitchers/mixers. There's a huge amount of data (12Gbps for 4K/UHD) per input, with many inputs and outputs, all with extremely tight timing tolerances. If you loosen the latency restrictions you can do a small numbers of inputs on regular PCs (see OBS Studio), but at some point a PC architecture will not scale easily anymore and it is much more efficient to just use FPGAs that will do the required logic in hardware. It's such a small market that for most devices an ASIC is not a option.
Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family
#24Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family
#25I wonder what is the hardware programming interface.
Something "horribly" simple I hope and suppose (memory mapped command ring buffers and dma buffers?)
Then quickly getting up and running a shmol RV64 core... and I guess this is hacker paradise.
Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family
#26No hard core is a bummer. I want to see the first party SOM.
Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family
#27What are some killer apps for FPGAs? What major products do they enable?
They enable a lot of crazy defence products. A well known german product for example is the Iris-T from Diehl Defence. Highly accurate and exceptional engineering. But I guess FPGAs are in most defence products nowadays. I think the biggest reason is that you can build/verify your own hardware without having to go through the expensive ASIC manufacturing Edit: I just realized that these are some literal killer apps.…
> But I guess FPGAs are in most defence products nowadays.
Yes.
> I think the biggest reason is that you can build/verify your own hardware without having to go through the expensive ASIC manufacturing.
Plus, you don't give out your secrets to fabs, too. Design, verify, launch, discard, without the need for signing an NDA.
Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family
#28Shame it is only PCI-e Gen 4.
Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family
#29What are some killer apps for FPGAs? What major products do they enable?
Broadly speaking anything that does either a lot of reasonably specialized logic and medium-to-high performance broad work will have an FPGA in it (unless its made in very high volumes in which case it may be an ASIC, ditto for very high performance things).
Some FPGAs are absolutely tiny e.g. you might just use it as a fancy way of turning a stream of bits into something in parallel for a custom bit of hardware you have, other FPGAs are truly enormous and might be used for making a semi-custom CPU so you can do low latency signal processing or high frequency trading and so on.
Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family
#30What are some killer apps for FPGAs? What major products do they enable?
I think low latency is the main thing. In most cases, to get an FPGA that's faster in terms of compute than a GPU/CPU you're going to have to spend probably hundreds of thousands (which the military do, e.g. for radar and that sort of thing).
But even a very cheap FPGA will beat any CPU/GPU on latency.