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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

#71

Post by morphle »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #57
DannyBee wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already supported this line rate though, for years? What am i missing? (IE It's still only pcie gen3, and this announcement doesn't change that)

Spartan 6 had transceivers. Spartan 7 dropped them. Boo. Spartan UltraScale+ brings them back. Hooray! (Though to morphie's point we should probably hold the champagne until we see pricing.) Also, it looks like PCIe Gen 4. The bitrate is enough and the page says Gen4x8. Is there something I'm missing?

Yes, we are missing vital information.

Similar issues as Artix Ultrascale+ where the small print says " PCIe Gen4 is available in AU10P and AU15P in the FFVB676 package. AU10P and AU15P in other packages support Gen3x8.". Same die for all these FPGAs but not same speeds at given prices. Most of the die will be disabled, 'binned'.

So Spartan 7 Ultrascale+ can theoretically support 8 lanes of PCIe Gen 4.0, but if they actually do at the price you pay is unclear and also if the PCIe 4 IP is free or very expensive and only available in the expensive toolchain under NDA?

[1] https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/device-famil...

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#72

Post by morphle »

jeff-davis wrote: post #6

What are some killer apps for FPGAs? What major products do they enable?

Products with PCIe (PCI Express) and high speed interfaces like 10G Ethernet, SATA, HDMI, USB 3.0 and higher, Thunderbolt.

Most of the ASICs with these SerDes interfaces are not for sale on the open market, only for OEM who buy MOQ of millions.

Take for example the Raspberry PI SBCs. The Raspberry Pi only got PCIe very late (compute model 4), influencer Jeff unlocked them with a lot of difficulty https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com but you still can't buy these cheap microprocessors from Broadcom.

The reason is that no cheap PCIe chips are available for hobbyists and small company buyers (below a million dollars).

'Cheap' FPGA's starting at $200+ where and still are the only PCIe devices for sale to anyone. If you want to nitpick, a few low speed Serdes are available in $27 ECP5 FPGA's, but no 10 Gbps and higher.

Another example, I sell $130 switches with 100 Gbps switching speeds and PCIe 4x8 and QSFP28 optics. But you can't buy the AWS/Amazon ASIC chips on this board anywhere, nor their competitors chips from Broadcom, Intel, MicroSemi/Microchip, Marvell.

I went as high as Intel's vice president and also their highest level account manager VPs and still got no answer on how to buy their ASIC switches or FPGAs.

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#73

Post by Aromasin »

nsteel wrote: post #38
Aromasin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The ReefShark ASIC sits alongside an FPGA which acts akin to an IPU. I know only because I played my own small part in the design. It was originally meant to be entirely FPGA-based, but they got hit with some severe supply constraints by Intel and Xilinx, which is why cost keeps getting discussed. Prices have dropped back down to stable numbers again since mid-last year, but at the time ASICs ended up being more affordable at the volume they're doing (demand spiked mid-project due to the removal of Huawei networking equipment).

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#74

Post by nickpsecurity »

jeff-davis wrote: post #6

What are some killer apps for FPGAs? What major products do they enable?

In the past, I’d have tried to use Achronix’s FPGA’s for secure processors like Burroughs B5000, Sandia Secure Processor, SAFE architecture, or CHERI. One could also build I/O processors with advanced IOMMU’s, crypto, etc. Following trusted/untrusted pattern, I’d put as much non-security-critical processing as possible into x86 or ARM chips with secure cores handling what had to be secure.

High-risk operations could run the most critical stuff on these CPU’s. That would reduce the security effort from who knows how many person-years to basically spending more per unit and recompiling. Using lean, fast software would reduce the performance gap a bit.

CHERI is now shipping in ASIC’s, works with CPU’s that fit in affordable FPGA’s, and so this idea could happen again.

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#75

Post by babypuncher »

jeff-davis wrote: post #6

What are some killer apps for FPGAs? What major products do they enable?

From a consumer-facing perspective, FPGAs have enabled a golden age of reasonably affordable and upgradeable hardware for relatively niche tech hobbies.

* Replacement parts for vintage computers * Flash cartridges and optical drive emulators for older video game consoles * High-speed, high quality analog video upscalers

Many of these things aren't produced at a scale where producing bespoke chips is not really viable. Using an FPGA lets you build your product with off the shelf parts, and lets you squish bugs in the field with a firmware update.

There is also MiSTer, an open source project to re-implement a wide range of vintage computer hardware on the Terasic DE10-Nano FPGA.

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#76

Post by amirhirsch »

morphle wrote: post #51
smallmancontrov wrote: post #45

> Transceivers – Up to 8 GTH transceivers supporting up to 16.3 Gb/s Hey, the Spartan line is useful again!

Finally, I waited years for this. I could only use the Kitex line. Big question is will these Spartan Ultrascale+ with tranceivers and PCIe 4.0 be cheaper or more expensive?

They have strong competition from Lattice and I really thought they had ceded the low-end to them already. For the PCIe chips you can figure out where the pricing must fall for a certain feature set, but I'd be surprised if the cheapest PCIe 4.0 part in the Spartan US+ family is under $500. Consider the Lattice Avant-X series as competitive reference: https://www.mouser.com/c/semiconductors/programmable-logic-i...

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#77

Post by morphle »

amirhirsch wrote: post #76
morphle wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally, I waited years for this. I could only use the Kitex line. Big question is will these Spartan Ultrascale+ with tranceivers and PCIe 4.0 be cheaper or more expensive?

They have strong competition from Lattice and I really thought they had ceded the low-end to them already. For the PCIe chips you can figure out where the pricing must fall for a certain feature set, but I'd be surprised if the cheapest PCIe 4.0 part in the Spartan US+ family is under $500. Consider the Lattice Avant-X series as competitive reference: https://www.mouser.com/c/semiconductors/programmable-logic-i...

Strong competition from Lattice? I might be missing something, but AFAIK Lattice certuspro-nx FPGA's are more expesive and so is the synthesis software.

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#78

Post by willis936 »

aylons wrote: post #70
mukundmr wrote: post #41

From the article "AMD Spartan UltraScale+ samples and evaluation kits are expected to be available for sampling and evaluation in the first half of 2025." For hardware products, what is the point of making these announcements a year in advance? Are they available for select partners before 2025?

Oh, yes. Hardware products and projects, specially those complex enough to need an FPGA, will usually have a long development pipeline and even one year seems pretty short. And you can very often prototype with either an overpowered development board or you own prototype board with another FPGA, and then downsize appropriately as the project advances. Most importantly, if you know there will be a viable version in a…

Do companies really gamble on their supply chain that hard?

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#79

Post by tadfisher »

FLT8 wrote: post #39
dailykoder wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Jones, fire on the bandit at 270."

"Yessir."

"Jones, why isn't that SAM in the air?"

"Sarge, it's flashing the bitstream. The progress bar says 60%."

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#80

Post by blihp »

willis936 wrote: post #78
aylons wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, yes. Hardware products and projects, specially those complex enough to need an FPGA, will usually have a long development pipeline and even one year seems pretty short. And you can very often prototype with either an overpowered development board or you own prototype board with another FPGA, and then downsize appropriately as the project advances. Most importantly, if you know there will be a viable version in a…

Do companies really gamble on their supply chain that hard?

They don't have a choice. FPGA's aren't like vanilla logic chips: they are highly proprietary both in terms of their specific hardware functionality as well as software tool chains and you can't second source them. Some of the larger customers are using them for government contracts (think military and space applications) where they are signing up products they are contractually on the hook for from years to decades.
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