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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

#11

Post by tverbeure »

bfrog wrote: post #5
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…

"a customizable fpga into our CPUs" that already happened, it just didn't happen in x86 land. There have been a good number of products from various vendors that connect up hard cores and fpga fabric. power pc cores, riscv cores, and by large arm cores

That's not what OP meant though. They were talking about custom CPU instructions implemented with FPGA logic.

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

#12

Post by throwaway4590 »

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 sure exactly what operations you could see real gain with from small reconfigurable fabrics near the CPU. Still, I liked the elegance of having L1-L3+ FPGA's for speeding up operations of increasing levels of complexity, and I figured programmers smarter than me would find creative ways of using the FPGA's with the added instructions.

[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10310868B2/

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

#13

Post by trsohmers »

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 have announced the new Agilex 3 line, which should include some CPLD price point parts and be a real rebirth for ~$100/unit modern devices.

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

#15

Post by mikewarot »

tverbeure wrote: post #4
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…

> 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

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

#16

Post by duskwuff »

tverbeure wrote: post #4
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…

> 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…

> It's one of those things that seem like a good idea, but they just don't work out in practice.

GPGPU sucks a lot of air out of the room as well. There aren't many purely computational problems which FPGAs can solve better than a compute-optimized GPU; even though GPUs aren't quite as flexible, they clock a lot faster, they're cheaper, and they're easier to develop for.

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

#17

Post by j_not_j »

tverbeure wrote: post #4
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…

> 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…

> FPGA LUTs are just way too slow

If, and of course that is a big if, you can repackage a (parallelizable) calculation into FPGA look-up tables and implement multiples of this (e.g. 8 to 80 times) then you can think maybe it's quicker than CPU at 3GHz.

However, you have to include DMA of the data to and fro. It's unlikely to be worth the very extensive effort of integrating two wildly different technologies.

On the other hand, it may not be a complicated calculation but FPGA can do much lower latency and smaller variance in latency (hello high-frequency traders). That is a very narrow niche.

A simple board with CPU and FPGA is the Arduino MKR Vidor 4000: ARM Cortex 32-bit CPU and Intel Cyclone 10 FPGA). Hardware cost: $85. Full suite of development software $1000 or more (although lesser tools are available for free.)

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

#18

Post by almatabata »

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…

Thanks for sharing. Small question about Image 20, does that represent a use case for an instruction translator? For example you have an arm chip and you want to run x86 code so you offload the x86 instructions to the fpga?

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

#19

Post by throwaway4590 »

almatabata wrote: post #18
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…

Thanks for sharing. Small question about Image 20, does that represent a use case for an instruction translator? For example you have an arm chip and you want to run x86 code so you offload the x86 instructions to the fpga?

I believe my contributions start at Image 25 on Google. Images 1-24 are generic CPU boilerplate images that the lawyers add to most patents in the field.
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