accelerator boards/coprocessors for doing linear algebra
I'd like one for geometric algebra!
An array of tiny little compasses and straight-edges would be perfect!
AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx
21–30 of 115 posts
Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx
#22Earlier 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…
There's the possibility of a Xilinx Zynq with AMD x86 cores instead of the ARM cores in current Zynq versions, though I'm not sure that would really be interesting to anyone. Beyond that, there's been research in the past that envisions using a FPGA fabric as an execution unit within the CPU itself: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/emips/ Intel hasn't pursued such a thing but that doesn't mean AMD cou…
I think you'd have a hard time making a large FPGA actually part of a CPU die due to area. A peer on the memory bus ala CCIX on the other hand...
Have you ever thought of building your own processor or maybe just defining your own machine instructions? With eMIPS now you can.
Microcode strikes me as the natural way to define arbitrary instructions.
Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx
#23I 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…
What I want is a small FPGA that is really close to each CPU core. I want to be able to send a query to it with about the same minimum latency as an L1 hit.
Basically, I want it to implement what are essentially custom CPU instructions.
Rather than implementing your full algorithm on a big FPGA over a PCIe link, you should be able to implement just the few custom specialized instructions that regular CPU is missing, while still utilizing the regular CPU resources.
Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx
#24Feels like a datacenter play for specialized compute. Given AMDs domination of server workloads in $/performance, seems like doubling down on that advantage. FPGA is already used today to offload SSL termination from the CPU.
Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx
#25Intel does not seem to have capitalized on the Altera acquisition but maybe that is also related to Intel's fab issues.
From an operation perspective, this combines two non-overlapping TSMC customers that can potentially negotiate better wafer prices together. I assume that AMD has significantly higher wafer counts than Xilinx so this would primarily benefit the Xilinx business.
From a technology perspective, this acquisition may succeed where the Intel/Altera acquisition fizzled due to AMD's chiplet approach. Swapping a processor core for an FPGA chiplet might be an "easy" win in some markets.
Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx
#26Is there an open source/open standards FPGA? Equivalent of what RISC-V is for processors so to speak?
Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx
#27I 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…
Intel has an fpga+xeon combo, but it's poorly designed and expensive.
Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx
#28Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx
#295 years ago amd was a $2 stock and xilinx was a 50 dollar stock. Now amd is a 80 dollar stock and Xilinxis ~100 dollar stock. Xilinx market cap was 5x of amd. Even today xilinx generates more free cash than amd. Its kind of crazy how fast company values can change.
It's also weird because shareholders want stocks to grow indefinitely at an exponential rate, whereas there are a whole lot of companies like Xilinx that don't really need to grow all that much beyond just scaling to a number of gates that is useful to today's industry. Or Dropbox, which I really don't want them doing anything innovative except syncing my directories between machines until the end of time.
Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx
#30Intel does not seem to have capitalized on the Altera acquisition but maybe that is also related to Intel's fab issues. From an operation perspective, this combines two non-overlapping TSMC customers that can potentially negotiate better wafer prices together. I assume that AMD has significantly higher wafer counts than Xilinx so this would primarily benefit the Xilinx business. From a technology perspective, this ac…
> From a technology perspective, this acquisition may succeed where the Intel/Altera acquisition fizzled due to AMD's chiplet approach.
Intel has been using EIMB quite effectively to allow for very interesting fpga configurability, letting purchasers pick from a variety of "front end" transcievers to match their app[1]. This doesn't combine multiple big processors, but is still a very interesting tech!
Intel's also been working to standardize & accelerate mulit-chip connectivity, by donating their Advanced Interface Bus to the open group the CHIPS Alliance[2]. This saw a 2.0 draft emerge this summer.
Agreed that Intel has been fairly ineffective at driving interesting new fpga adoption. There has been interesting work but it's hard to see what adoption has looked like. There is the Xeon 6138P for example, which uses a UPI link and dual 8x PCIe links of a 20 core xeon chip to talk to an on-package Arria 10GX[3]. I'm not a market researcher, but my guess is that adoption hasn't been stellar. I haven't seen any follow ups. I do hope there have been some interesting & good uses though! I feel like AMD will face similar challenges to adoption. Frankly, tech like Xe and Radeon seems more appealing to the world we live in; big gpus that can do bfloat16 &c. One of the big advantages of fpgas has been great connectivity, powerful transcievers & other i/o capabilities, which, if you put them in an existing platform socket, is probably going to squander some of those capabilities, I feel like?
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14211/intels-interconnected-f...
[2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15434/intel-joins-chips-allia...
[3] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-scalab...