Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

fpgaer.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 81 posts

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#31

Post by baybal2 »

guiriduro wrote: post #27
baybal2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also you can buy an AMD EPYC chip with twice the cores for about the same price you'd pay only for the CPU part of this chip/half the intel cores. Indeed. What benefits the most from being turned into FPGA circuit are stateless or minimally stateful circuits like media decoders/encoders. Complex stuff like fancy routers, classifiers, internet protocol inspection/handling will not gain a hundredfold speedup unlike th…

Pretty sure AWS has had f1 instances for some time already.

Yeah, but for those one you still have to do all the HDL programming stuff yourself. Alibaba on other hand aims to provide everything ready to use over a cute RDMA api

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#32

Post by sanxiyn »

llukas wrote: post #7
batbomb wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phi is dead. The next NERSC computer is GPUs. Not sure what Argonne is doing but there’s no reason to think it won’t be GPUs. The only reason Phi/KNL made sense was because it seemed like a conservative choice when GPUs were more exotic, which may have been okay if Intel didn’t have the crazy yield problems they had. FPGAs don’t make sense because the conservative choice at this point is GPU. I don’t think any of the…

Cmon it wasn't just yield problems. Premise that you can just recompile CPU code and it would run quickly on Phi was false.

It's a pity. Intel does have a compiler that works great for Xeon Phi: ISPC. Alas, it seems Intel was never serious about ISPC.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#33

Post by pjc50 »

thesz wrote: post #24
Keyframe wrote: post #23

Depending on the price, this will be interesting for I/do-something/O workloads like video encoding/decoding. Depending on the price, looking forward to it. Of course, depending on the price. :)

You won't have enough resources for video encoding, most probably. Arria 10 FPGA has 67M bits of memory total (8.5M bytes ), including one simulated with registers. As far as I remember, just storing 1920x1080 (HD) frame in 4:2:0 mode would require 4M bytes, half of memory. 4K would require 4 times as much resources. You may do some on-line processing like running neural net on the video content, but that's about it.…

You have more than enough resources for video encoding, because all modern codecs have a macroblock structure. You don't need to keep the whole current frame in at once, you can slide a window around it. (Conversely, you do need to keep the matching area of the previous frame and maybe even the next frame in order to do proper inter-prediction). That said I would assume GPUs are more suited to this task.

By FPGA standards this thing is enormous.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#34

Post by pjc50 »

sddfd wrote: post #12

This is great! I think that some time in the future, FPGA will be a vital part for data processing. In theory, an application with a computation-heavy task could program the FPGA to provide part of that task in hardware (think the hot innermost loop body). What I am worried about is the infrastructure that is needed to make this happen: Is there even support for this in our compilers? What would support look like?

> In theory, an application with a computation-heavy task could program the FPGA to provide part of that task in hardware (think the hot innermost loop body).

This is absurdly far away; it reminds me of the decades of assumption that 4GLs are going to obsolete programmers or the decades of trying to cross-compile C to FPGAs, badly.

It doesn't help that there's a huge infrastructure barrier caused by closed tools. Imagine if Intel brought out a processor with a proprietary instruction set where you were only allowed to use their FORTRAN compiler (no C, let alone anything more modern or JIT) with a per-seat license. That's where FPGA tools are.

We won't see a Cambrian explosion in FPGA tooling until they are made properly open. Building using open-source tools needs to be actively supported by the manufacturer.

There are also conceptual obstacles; FPGAs are sufficiently different that programmers have to re-learn and re-write idioms in order to get usable results. It's as big a jump as going from Javascript to CUDA.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#35

Post by agumonkey »

kristianp wrote: post #28
chx wrote: post #15

On a whole different level, if you are merely interested in FPGAs in your computer then the PicoEVB neatly goes in the same M.2 slot as wifi cards do and communicates over PCIe, even if just PCIe Gen 2 x1. As far as I am aware this is, by far, the cheapest way to get an FPGA on the PCIe bus.

Don't new laptops only have one of those, for their hard drives?

It's confusing me. wifi cards don't need m2 slot, I thought it was a standard made for SSDs. Usually wifi cards use basic mini pcie sockets, even on old (2006>) 12" laptops you can find 2, albeit sometimes only one socket is installed (the other is empty space with pins there, some people even soldered one manually)

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#37

Post by rjsw »

kristianp wrote: post #28
chx wrote: post #15

On a whole different level, if you are merely interested in FPGAs in your computer then the PicoEVB neatly goes in the same M.2 slot as wifi cards do and communicates over PCIe, even if just PCIe Gen 2 x1. As far as I am aware this is, by far, the cheapest way to get an FPGA on the PCIe bus.

Don't new laptops only have one of those, for their hard drives?

Some laptops have two.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#38

Post by loa-in-backup »

agumonkey wrote: post #35
kristianp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't new laptops only have one of those, for their hard drives?

It's confusing me. wifi cards don't need m2 slot, I thought it was a standard made for SSDs. Usually wifi cards use basic mini pcie sockets, even on old (2006>) 12" laptops you can find 2, albeit sometimes only one socket is installed (the other is empty space with pins there, some people even soldered one manually)

Directly from Wikipedia:

Buses exposed through the M.2 connector are PCI Express 3.0, Serial ATA (SATA) 3.0 and USB 3.0, which is backward compatible with USB 2.0. As a result, M.2 modules can integrate multiple functions, including the following device classes: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, satellite navigation, near field communication (NFC), digital radio, Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig), wireless WAN (WWAN), and solid-state drives (SSDs).

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#39

Post by rjsw »

sannee wrote: post #29
arcanus wrote: post #2

Could this be a hint at Intel's supercomputing and AI strategy? They cannot compete with GPUs on flops with Xeon, but an embedded FPGA might get them closer. It is a risky strategy however. Even if they can attain similar performance, which I doubt, programmability remains the big problem for FPGAs. I know Intel is pushing openCL but it simply does not have an ecosystem for software right now, and it remains to be se…

> They cannot compete with GPUs on flops with Xeon, but an embedded FPGA might get them closer. FPGAs aren't known for their FLOPs though. Sure, the high end ones pack a punch, but compared to GPUs are still extremely expensive.

Altera has hard floating point blocks in their FPGAs, I don't think any other manufacturer does though.

Re: Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping

#40

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

chx wrote: post #15

On a whole different level, if you are merely interested in FPGAs in your computer then the PicoEVB neatly goes in the same M.2 slot as wifi cards do and communicates over PCIe, even if just PCIe Gen 2 x1. As far as I am aware this is, by far, the cheapest way to get an FPGA on the PCIe bus.

There's no onboard RAM on the PicoEVB, other than whatever the FPGA itself provides. That makes it less interesting.
Post reply on HN