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AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

cnx-software.com

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Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#31

Post by [deleted] »

thunfisch wrote: post #23
jeff-davis wrote: post #6

What 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 t…

[deleted]

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#32

Post by dfox »

willis936 wrote: post #26

No hard core is a bummer. I want to see the first party SOM.

You mean something like this: https://www.amd.com/en/products/system-on-modules/kria.html

Spartan is the glue-logic family for applications that either do not require any kind of CPU core at all or where some simple soft-core (MicorBlaze, x51, hand crafted state machine...) suffices.

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#34

Post by willis936 »

dfox wrote: post #32
willis936 wrote: post #26

No hard core is a bummer. I want to see the first party SOM.

You mean something like this: https://www.amd.com/en/products/system-on-modules/kria.html Spartan is the glue-logic family for applications that either do not require any kind of CPU core at all or where some simple soft-core (MicorBlaze, x51, hand crafted state machine...) suffices.

Yes I do mean the Kria line, but one for this new Spartan Ultrascale+. I already buy packaged versions of $30 FPGAs because it alleviates most of the integration effort.

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#35

Post by hobo_mark »

sylware wrote: post #25

I 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.

An FPGA is a blank slate, more so than a CPU is, the programming interface is whatever the user wants to implement (including ring buffers and DMA or whatever).

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#37

Post by delfinom »

sylware wrote: post #25

I 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.

In FPGAs you are literally programming the enablement of individual logic gates. That's it.

There is no DMA or command ring, you have to implement it yourself.

The FPGA bit code itself is extremely propertiary to each vendor as the nature of controlling all the logic sauces is all secret sauce. So you have to use the vendors tooling.

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#38

Post by nsteel »

Aromasin wrote: post #22
rcxdude wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> they're in every 5G base station

Just a tiny nitpick to your great answer but Nokia's 5G base station stuff (Reefshark) is built around ASICs. I would expect others do the same. There's some reasoning at https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded/artic...

https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2020/06/15/noki...

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#39

Post by FLT8 »

dailykoder wrote: post #9
jeff-davis wrote: post #6

What 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.…

It also probably makes it easier to prevent adversaries from being able to delid/reverse engineer products. When using FPGAs you don't even need to have the firmware/gateware on or near device until it's in use, which would help prevent any sensitive trade secrets from making it into the wrong hands.

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#40

Post by mschuster91 »

thunfisch wrote: post #23
jeff-davis wrote: post #6

What 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 t…

Blackmagic's whole gear line is based on Xilinx FPGAs. Whatever product of them you see, if you tear it down, it will almost always be nothing more than SerDes chips, I/O controllers and FPGAs.
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