AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family • Hacker News Board

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#11

Post by shrubble » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 7:26 AM UTC

Lower-volume specialty chips for interfaces (lots of I/O pins), such as adapters for an odd interface, custom hardware designs for which there isn't an existing chip, etc.

For instance, audio, video or other signal processing can be done by putting the algorithm "directly" into the hardware design; it will run at a constant predictable speed thereafter.

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#12

Post by glimshe » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 7:56 AM UTC

Ultra-accurate classic computer and videogame emulators!

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#13

Post by DrFalkyn » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 7:59 AM UTC

They're used in places that require real time processing (DSP) of raw digital signals at very high (several hundred Mhz and more), where you cannot afford to miss a sample because of latency from a microcontroller (uC). I think even some PCI devices use them for this reason, and it allows you to update firmware whereas ASIC doesn't

A while back I wrote an entire FPGA pipeline to recalibrate signals from optical sensors before they were passed on to the CPU. Doing this allowed us to keep up processing speed with acquisition, so it was real time. A lot of FIR filters and FFTs. But my proudest achievement was a linear interpolation algorithm which is fairly high level and tricky to implement on FPGA, which is more geared towards simpler DSP algorithms like FIR filters, and FFT (not simpler but so much effort has got into making IPs it effectively is because you don't have to implement it yourself)

But other than that, for raw bulk compute GPUs are kicking their butts in most domains.

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#14

Post by oelang » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 8:00 AM UTC

Any sensor that captures a ton of data that needs realtime processing to 'compress' the data before the data can be forwarded to data accumulator. Think MRI or CT scanners but industrially there are thousands of applications.

If you need a lot of realtime processing to drive motors (think industrial robots of all kinds), FPGAs are preferred of micro-controllers.

All kinds of industrial sorting systems are driven by fpgas because the moment of measurement (typically with a camera) & the sorting decision are less than a milisecond apart.

There are many more, it's a very 'industrial' product nowadays, but sometimes an FPGA will pop up in a high-end smartphone or TV because they allow to add certain features late in the design cycle.

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#15

Post by fsh » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 8:08 AM UTC

The core of modern oscilloscopes is often an FPGA that reads out the analog-to-digital converters at ~gigasamples/s and dumps the result into a RAM chip. Some companies (Keysight, Siglent) use custom chips for this, but FPGAs are very common.

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#16

Post by p_l » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 8:33 AM UTC

Anything where you wish you could have an ASIC but you don't have the budget for custom ASIC, and where using smaller chips either makes for worse Bill of Materials or takes up more space.

They are used everywhere, including some very small ones I've seen used purely for power sequencing on motherboards - usually very small FPGA with embedded memory that "boots" first on standby voltage and contains simple combinatoric logic that controls how other devices on motherboard are getting powered up faster than any MCU can do it - while taking less space than discrete components.

Glue logic, custom I/O systems (including high-end backplanes in complex systems), custom devices (often combined with "hard" components in the chip, like ARM CPUs in Zynq series FPGA), specialized filters that can be runtime updated.

Lots of uses.

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#17

Post by dragonelite » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 8:59 AM UTC

Given the importance of Storage and Networking when working with big data for LLM. Having storage and network code in FPGA might be useful..

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#18

Post by bick_nyers » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 9:15 AM UTC

Some older video game consoles have been "emulated" in FPGA. You just map out the circuitry of a device and voila you get native performance without the bugs of a software implementation.

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#19

Post by stephen_g » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 9:43 AM UTC

This isn't "a" new FPGA, there'll be like 50+ (or even hundreds of) SKUs, many will be various BGA/chip scale packages (with different numbers of pins available) but not necessarily all of them. The Spartan line, being the lowest level of Xilinx's FPGAs, have traditionally had a few versions in TQFP packages. I wouldn't be incredibly surprised if they did with this new version (although it's probably less and less likely with each generation).

Re: AMD announces the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family

#20

Post by rcxdude » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 9:54 AM UTC

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 kind of thing. You'll almost never see them in consumer products (outside of maybe some super-tiny ones which aren't useful for compute but just do 'glue logic') because they're so expensive.