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AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

wsj.com

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Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#51

Post by 01100011 »

mhh__ wrote: post #2

I 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.

I believe this sort of thing has been talked about for years. Didn't Intel do something like that? This, for instance:

https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/05/24/a-peek-inside-that-i...

From what I remember, the problem is that there is a fairly large amount of work to get useful performance out of a hybrid like that. It's easier to just, say, learn CUDA and use a GPU than it is to have HDL folks work with SW. I have no doubt a system like that would be useful, but it would probably be expensive and limited to specialized, low-volume applications(like big FPGAs are now).

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#52

Post by st_goliath »

MayeulC wrote: post #48

The best outcome for me would be more open FPGA tools, maybe even documented bitstream format This could just be a strategic acquisition for internal purposes: I bet a lot of design and architecture validation is done on big FPGAs. Maybe they wanted some custom ones?

> I bet a lot of design and architecture validation is done on big FPGAs.

There was a talk at 32c3 (2015) by David Kaplan from AMD about developing and testing/verifying real world x86 CPU designs:

https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7171-when_hardware_must_just_wor...

Around minute ~11/12 he briefly mentions (among other methods) emulation on massive FPGA workstations costing something in the order of $1M.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#53

Post by [deleted] »

myself248 wrote: post #12

Going back to 2006, Xilinx was making FPGAs that would sit in an Opteron socket and speak HyperTransport to the other CPU(s). I never heard much more about that, but I can imagine it might've been popular with certain specialized workloads, in an era before GPU compute took off, or perhaps workloads that don't fit GPUs well. I wonder if those specialized applications might be a small but important market.

[deleted]

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#54

Post by adrian_b »

lnsru wrote: post #44

At least Xilinx will be able to fall back to AMD’s amd64 or x86 architecture if NVIDIA will limit ARM core licensing. The new SoC products like ZynQ Ultrascale+ with ARM cores are really great.

It is really useful to include ARM cores in a FPGA, but Xilinx has remain stuck with completely obsolete cores (Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A72) since forever.

The modern ARM cores, starting with Cortex-A55 (2017), use the corrected ISA ARMv8.2-A.

On the ancient cores used by Xilinx, when writing multithreaded applications, it is annoying to lack atomic instructions.

Yes, sure atomic instructions can be simulated with only the base ARMv8.0-A ISA, but it is not possible to guarantee worst case timings for the simulated atomics (because of retries).

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#55

Post by panpanna »

MayeulC wrote: post #48

The best outcome for me would be more open FPGA tools, maybe even documented bitstream format This could just be a strategic acquisition for internal purposes: I bet a lot of design and architecture validation is done on big FPGAs. Maybe they wanted some custom ones?

> I bet a lot of design and architecture validation is done on big FPGAs.

It is.

And the board and software used for this are so damn expensive they probably account for half of xilinx income despite the low quantities

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#56

Post by panpanna »

amirhirsch wrote: post #36

I think this is a terrible idea for the future of technology. AMD would not be existentially dependent on the FPGA market and the stack is so important to cutting-edge tech that it demands focused stewardship. It's clear something needs to change in FPGA land. Xilinx and Intel both produce abhorrent FPGA software causing project delays and cancellations of cutting-edge technology dependent on their devices. Xilinx pr…

Agreed, altera looks dead since intel took over.

This is probably good news only for Lattice Semiconductor.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#57

Post by DoingIsLearning »

amirhirsch wrote: post #36

I think this is a terrible idea for the future of technology. AMD would not be existentially dependent on the FPGA market and the stack is so important to cutting-edge tech that it demands focused stewardship. It's clear something needs to change in FPGA land. Xilinx and Intel both produce abhorrent FPGA software causing project delays and cancellations of cutting-edge technology dependent on their devices. Xilinx pr…

> Xilinx and Intel both produce abhorrent FPGA software causing project delays and cancellations of cutting-edge technology dependent on their devices.

I feel this pain!!!!

Absolutely love the flexibility of Xilinx's System-On-Module architectures but their Software toolchain is arguably the most time-wasting frustrating piece of software I have ever had to work with.

We need an open-source LLVM-like toolchain equivalent for FPGA's. I hope AMD has enough muscle to push for this.

I would also like to point out that there are projects out there pushing this boundary, David Shah has made amazing contributions towards this, with projects like SymbiFlow and yosys.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#58

Post by lnsru »

adrian_b wrote: post #54
lnsru wrote: post #44

At least Xilinx will be able to fall back to AMD’s amd64 or x86 architecture if NVIDIA will limit ARM core licensing. The new SoC products like ZynQ Ultrascale+ with ARM cores are really great.

It is really useful to include ARM cores in a FPGA, but Xilinx has remain stuck with completely obsolete cores (Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A72) since forever. The modern ARM cores, starting with Cortex-A55 (2017), use the corrected ISA ARMv8.2-A. On the ancient cores used by Xilinx, when writing multithreaded applications, it is annoying to lack atomic instructions. Yes, sure atomic instructions can be simulated with only…

From my perspective an ancient ARM core is better than 100 MHz Microblaze softcore. ARM core opens lots of new possibilities and I don’t need quirky high level synthesis.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#59

Post by why_only_15 »

rektide wrote: post #30
k0stas wrote: post #25

Intel 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 b…

Looks to be EMIB not EIMB
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