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Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip

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Re: Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip

#21

Post by foobarcrunch »

Whaaa? Isn't this what Tilera and Tabula were chasing? Maybe they were too early and/or didn't have the momentum to drive the industry? It does seem like an inevitable technological evolution direction, however compilers, debuggers and so on will need to optimize for an almost entirely new set of constraints.

The thing with using FPGA's in systems (they're great for low-volume, high-priced items where ASICs would be too costly) is they end up just emulating logic which could be more cheaply implemented as actual execution units (as many modern FPGA's things like cache, ROM, ALUs, etc.). That is, it's expensive flexibility that isn't really all that useful. Sure you could reconfigure a "computer" from doing database things to suddenly add more GPU cores to play games, but how useful or power/cost efficient would that be? Sure it's nice to cut down on ASICs and upgrading them after the fact, but it seems like more like category development than offering practical advantages to solve a real problem. Maybe a super-fast HPC-on-a-chip would be possible, but I don't see that we're storage or compute constrained, however we maybe bandwidth and latency constrained in terms of shrinking clusters to a single rack of ridiculously power-hungry reprogrammable chips.

Instead of infinitely customizable, arbitrary logic, you might have a crap-ton of simplified RISC cores with some memory and lots of interconnected bandwidth or something in-between FPGA and MPPA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_parallel_processor_a...

Re: Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip

#22

Post by pjc50 »

xt00 wrote: post #5

It's a little odd saying that Microsoft is betting its future on reprogramable chips.. From reading the article they are just simply now using FPGAs where previously they (along with many other companies) were not. It would be like saying Amazon is betting its future on UPS trucks.. What you put in the FPGA matters.. The reprogramability is really just to allow them to implement algorithms that they use heavily that…

For me the question of "flexibility" ties to the tools. Anyone who's ever tried to do FPGA development will know that it's not exactly agile. Third-party improvement of tools is blocked, because the "bitstream" format is confidential. Imagine if Intel or ARM refused to give you an instruction set manual and made you use a slow proprietary compiler with encrypted outputs.

Without great improvement and opening of the tools, FPGAs aren't going to be a general-purpose accelerator. It'll be a question of building one specific piece of firmware for one specific project and then deploying it semi-permanently with minor revisions across the cloud.

Wake me up when Visual Studio has an FPGA backend.

Re: Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip

#23

Post by totalZero »

mastax wrote: post #12
RandomOpinion wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intel now owns Alterra so this internal thrust at MSFT may be why they bought them. Intel openly acknowledges it. From the article: " Microsoft’s services are so large, and they use so many FPGAs, that they’re shifting the worldwide chip market. The FPGAs come from a company called Altera, and Intel vice president Diane Bryant tells me that Microsoft is why Intel acquired Altera last summer—a deal worth $16.7 billi…

>Altera strikes me as an odd choice though. I'd have thought Intel would buy out Xilinx, the industry leader, instead. Intel had been fabbing (some of?) Altera's chips for a few years before the acquisition, so from this angle it makes more sense than Xilinx. As to why Altera had this partnership and not Xilinx, who knows. Perhaps being in second place motivates you to shake things up.

My understanding is that Intel has a service called Intel Custom Foundry that gives smaller partner companies access to Intel's fabrication pipeline. Altera was a client of Intel Custom Foundry, and the two companies started to build some FPGA-accelerated x86 products together, so it was a pretty natural acquisition versus a potential Xilinx deal.

Re: Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip

#24

Post by friendzis »

xt00 wrote: post #5

It's a little odd saying that Microsoft is betting its future on reprogramable chips.. From reading the article they are just simply now using FPGAs where previously they (along with many other companies) were not. It would be like saying Amazon is betting its future on UPS trucks.. What you put in the FPGA matters.. The reprogramability is really just to allow them to implement algorithms that they use heavily that…

It is also possible that Microsoft leverages reprogramability of FPGAs to iterate over some designs that will at some point land in Intel chips. FPGA is probably the only solution that is both relatively cost efficient and real silicon allowing to iterate over silicon designs.

Re: Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip

#25

Post by friendzis »

mastax wrote: post #12
RandomOpinion wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intel now owns Alterra so this internal thrust at MSFT may be why they bought them. Intel openly acknowledges it. From the article: " Microsoft’s services are so large, and they use so many FPGAs, that they’re shifting the worldwide chip market. The FPGAs come from a company called Altera, and Intel vice president Diane Bryant tells me that Microsoft is why Intel acquired Altera last summer—a deal worth $16.7 billi…

>Altera strikes me as an odd choice though. I'd have thought Intel would buy out Xilinx, the industry leader, instead. Intel had been fabbing (some of?) Altera's chips for a few years before the acquisition, so from this angle it makes more sense than Xilinx. As to why Altera had this partnership and not Xilinx, who knows. Perhaps being in second place motivates you to shake things up.

From my own experience Altera floods education/research facilities with free-or-cheap developement boards and tools compared to Xilinx. Much like Atmel or Microsoft itself. Microsoft already has large programs to grow users for their software and Altera is more suitable in this regard.

Re: Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip

#26

Post by Eridrus »

foobarcrunch wrote: post #21

Whaaa? Isn't this what Tilera and Tabula were chasing? Maybe they were too early and/or didn't have the momentum to drive the industry? It does seem like an inevitable technological evolution direction, however compilers, debuggers and so on will need to optimize for an almost entirely new set of constraints. The thing with using FPGA's in systems (they're great for low-volume, high-priced items where ASICs would be…

I keep hearing that FPGAs suck, but they seem like a reasonable middle ground between CPUs and ASICs in terms of cost efficiency as this article mentions.

Re: Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip

#27

Post by Eridrus »

aab0 wrote: post #6
gradys wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA > ... in the coming weeks, they will drive new search algorithms based on deep neural networks—artificial intelligence modeled on the structure of the human brain—executing this AI several orders of magnitude faster than ordinary chips could.

That raises as many questions as it answers. Why FPGAs and not GPUs which can run just about any deep neural network but usually faster and more efficiently?

GPUs give you great throughput, but they're expensive, eat a lot of power, only work well in batch and aren't tuned to prediction (eg poor INT8 performance and too much VRAM).

Re: Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip

#28

Post by emcq »

aab0 wrote: post #6
gradys wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA > ... in the coming weeks, they will drive new search algorithms based on deep neural networks—artificial intelligence modeled on the structure of the human brain—executing this AI several orders of magnitude faster than ordinary chips could.

That raises as many questions as it answers. Why FPGAs and not GPUs which can run just about any deep neural network but usually faster and more efficiently?

GPUs have worse performance per watt than a tuned FPGA. Some newer FPGAs can have 400 megabits of on chip RAM - that's huge, significantly larger than the 128-256k cache typically available on chip for a GPU that turns into big energy savings.

Re: Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip

#29

Post by Neeek »

j1vms wrote: post #13
Neeek wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything they want. I think it's like having a blank breadboard circuit, Microsoft can mock up a new purpose designed chip and program it in to these FPGAs instead of having to fab one up from scratch. It's hard to tell from the article though, I'm just guessing.

There are resource limitations to contend with, roughly like an limit on total number of logic gates (e.g. AND, NOR,..) that can be "rewired", and also the bus speed to memory can become prohibitive for some applications. This is why GPUs have been so successful at the subset of problems they are targeted at, just like GPUs as compared to CPUs. However, FPGAs are becoming ever more malleable and heterogeneous: the em…

Yeah, not thinking they are all powerful, just sounds like they can be fine tuned easier than designing a whole new for-purpose chips.

Thank you for the info though!

Re: Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip

#30

Post by p1esk »

emcq wrote: post #28
aab0 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That raises as many questions as it answers. Why FPGAs and not GPUs which can run just about any deep neural network but usually faster and more efficiently?

GPUs have worse performance per watt than a tuned FPGA. Some newer FPGAs can have 400 megabits of on chip RAM - that's huge, significantly larger than the 128-256k cache typically available on chip for a GPU that turns into big energy savings.

GPUs have worse performance per watt than a tuned FPGA

Citation needed.

Maxwell Jetson TX1 is claimed to achieve 1TFlops FP16 at <10W, and soon to be released Pascal based replacement will probably be even more efficient.

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