11–20 of 115 posts
I'm unsure if this type of merger is good for consumers. Will AMD and Xilinx make better products together, or does competition drive them more efficiently. I tend to believe the latter.
[0]: https://www.hpcwire.com/2011/07/13/jp_morgan_buys_into_fpga_...
I never heard much more about that, but I can imagine it might've been popular with certain specialized workloads, in an era before GPU compute took off, or perhaps workloads that don't fit GPUs well.
I wonder if those specialized applications might be a small but important market.
Going back to 2006, Xilinx was making FPGAs that would sit in an Opteron socket and speak HyperTransport to the other CPU(s). I never heard much more about that, but I can imagine it might've been popular with certain specialized workloads, in an era before GPU compute took off, or perhaps workloads that don't fit GPUs well. I wonder if those specialized applications might be a small but important market.
I would quite like an FPGA on board my CPU. Intel have what used to be called Altera, but they don't seem to have done much publicly with it in relation to their CPU business.
The current model for interacting with an FPGA connected to a PC has it sitting on a peripheral card, on the other side of a PCIe bus. AFAIK there's no story for exposing higher level abstractions of these devices though the OS in a way that would allow them to be shared between different applications. How would you envision an "FPGA on board the CPU" differing from this? Would it still be a separate thing the way GP…
There's SoC devices that have a soft processor on it that runs a linux kernel and can communicate with the FPGA.
accelerator boards/coprocessors for doing linear algebra
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current model for interacting with an FPGA connected to a PC has it sitting on a peripheral card, on the other side of a PCIe bus. AFAIK there's no story for exposing higher level abstractions of these devices though the OS in a way that would allow them to be shared between different applications. How would you envision an "FPGA on board the CPU" differing from this? Would it still be a separate thing the way GP…
I think the idea of configurable hdl modules could be very interesting. A game could load a physics core. Ssh could load a security core and so on. These could be updated similar to firmware or even could ship with the application. The only barrier right now is the long programming times.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current model for interacting with an FPGA connected to a PC has it sitting on a peripheral card, on the other side of a PCIe bus. AFAIK there's no story for exposing higher level abstractions of these devices though the OS in a way that would allow them to be shared between different applications. How would you envision an "FPGA on board the CPU" differing from this? Would it still be a separate thing the way GP…
currently the PCIe card would need some kind of driver to be written on the OS to communicate with it. There's SoC devices that have a soft processor on it that runs a linux kernel and can communicate with the FPGA.
My impression was that you tended to define pretty static blocks of functionality (you know, hash calculators for your bitcoin mining or whatever), and then just communicate to those from the OS using interrupts and a shared memory interface like any other peripheral.