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AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

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Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#61

Feels 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.

Yeah it feels like a move to try and keep up with Nvidia. With Xilinx, they might be able to offer a networking offload product similar to Mellanox. They can also focus on ML acceleration that is custom tailored to the task instead of trying to push GPUs. AMD really needs to focus on software if they want to catch Nvidia though.

"ML acceleration that is custom tailored to the task"

Hope for this, the Nvidia monopoly is hurting ML, I wished to have something else but am forced to buy Nvidias offerings b/c hardware and tool support.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#62
It's quite an interesting world where AMD has one of the 8 cores on a chip-let be a Xilinx FPGA. The only issue is they are not easy enough to program but maybe AMD can get out ahead of Nvidia on this one and define the software stack here in the way Nvidia did with CUDA.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#63

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…

Totally agree.

Being involved with FPGAs for 20+ years now, and Xilinx for the most part of it, I have witnessed the progressive decay of their software quality. The legacy Xilinx tools (Foundation) were far from perfect but at least useable -- and hackable to a degree if you needed to implement workarounds. Those were many times even suggested by Xilinx own employees that were easy to approach and responsive back in the days.

Altera Quartus was always better in terms of project organization and user interface, including their hardware tools. Third party software such as Synplify (before Synopsys bought their maker Synplicity) were light-years ahead, especially on the synthesis introspection and support for design and RTL troubleshooting.

People tend to justify the software quality and vendor lock-in because these are niche markets. I think that is a lame statement. You could tell both Xilinx and Altera, being "fabless hardware companies", treated their software departments as a necessary burden and not a critical part of their business model, which by de facto it was. The software started going downhill, progressively accumulating technical debt while it kept getting even more cryptic and expensive. I think they offshored a significant part of its maintenance in the last decade. Each release fixed bugs but astonishingly introduced very stupid new ones that a minimally decent software verification process should have caught.

Vivado is a mess. You can optimize your workflow digging down deeply with TCL scripts (yikes, its 2020!). However who has the time for learning their badly designed API and fighting with the quirkiness of their tools? I am amazed some of us use it in regulated environments where our tools need to be properly validated. I have had designs that take more than one day to synthesize, map and route. Having being bitten by some bugs and my own errors dealing with the cumbersome IDE, I always painfully go through all the logs of each step, and also many times recreate the project and rebuild just to check if the output is reproducible.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#64
I'm really very bearish on this idea. When Intel bought Altera there were really 3 issues. The first was that they drove growth by bundling their FPGA stuff with their fabrication services - so like someone like Ericson could do half their design on FPGA and then slowly move to ASIC. That was good for Intel because it won them business, but it didn't really do anything for FPGAs.

The second thing was bundling FPGAs into the same package as a CPU. There were two problems with this, firstly it's a load of dark silicon when you aren't using the FPGA part and you have to make a load of tricky decisions like "Am I going to design my thermals to let me run all the Xeon cores at max speed whilst running my FPGA". The other problem being that it's really bloody hard figuring out the programming model, where the FPGA wants a deterministic data flow and you've got these CPU nutters throwing memory at you out of order, stalling and screwing you up with really bizarre cache behaviour. Since the CPU guys designed the interface it leaves the FPGA developer an almost impossible task to build efficient processing pipelines.

Finally we've got the moonshot - the idea that you could come up with a high level design language to programme FPGAs like software. Intel very heavily invested in this when they bought Altera but I'm still not seeing any forward progress on this, and let's be clear, Intel poured huge resources into making that happen. The last I heard they had over 100 engineers on that project and the sum total of their achievement is a handful of "partners" who wrote OpenCL/HLS/whatever and then worked with the engineers to go through a grueling process re-writing their code over and over and over until it looked like the RTL they already wanted. At one point Intel were going to re-write their entire FPGA video IP suite in HLS, I don't know how they went, but the acquisition of Omnitek probably wasn'ta good sign. It's been 4 years since the acquisition, and they were working on it long before then. The project is still basically just a load of marketing guff on their website that no one can actually use. I would say with the innevitable restructuring that Intel will have to do due to their various other fuck ups, this project is on thin ice.

The problem is that AMD is so likely to fall into the trap of points 2 and 3, and we're going to lose the final big independent FPGA company so that AMD can kill themselves trying to compete with Nvidia. And the real danger is that whilst all that's happening, actual innovation will disappear in the FPGA space. Xilinx's ACAPs are actually interesting (one way of solving the programming model), but Intel's last piece of innovation in the FPGA space died with the failure of hyperflex.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#65
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

How would OSs manage this security and process wise? I imagine its impossible to program an fpga fast enough to have it switch config for each process that wants it.

Why re-program? Extend the X86 ISA with a set of instructions for mailbox style programming (put, trigger, wait for flag/interrupt, get), then address the FPGA as a set of registers and flags.

Hide the registers or set a flag if the FPGA is not configured for it.

Moreover, put another configuration flag to FPGA part so that it either shows up a device or works as a set of registers.

It's easier said than done but, it's not impossible.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#67
post #66

As a value multiplying investment AMD should buy a company that has programmers that can code a half-decent CUDA compatible layer for its graphics cards.

Cuda will suddenly change and then the AMD implementation will look old. AMD is in a position to take over via LLVM open source extensions instead of CUDA.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#68
Aside from the technology, this merger probably means a bunch more downward pressure on jobs/salaries for silicon hardware people doesn't it? The consolidations in the chip industry generally have produced an oversupply of redundant roles after mergers, such that wages in silicon jobs are much lower than in software, right? This only adds more.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#69

It's quite an interesting world where AMD has one of the 8 cores on a chip-let be a Xilinx FPGA. The only issue is they are not easy enough to program but maybe AMD can get out ahead of Nvidia on this one and define the software stack here in the way Nvidia did with CUDA.

VHDL / Verilog is very different, but not necessarily harder per-se. It's just people spend 4 years learning "normal" programming, and at best have a one-semester course which uses VHDL.

But yes, a software stack would help.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#70
post #50

I have been looking forward to this happening for a long time. A quick search on my past comment shows that was 2016. And I remember checking Xilinx market cap last year and it was ~$30+ B, while AMD was only ~$50 B. I was thinking the chance of that ever happening is going to be very slim. ( I was an AMD Shareholder, but I never thought it would be $100B mark cap company, sold it all last year) Now AMD is at $100B+,…

I sold a few shares when they were at 20 or some dollars a share thinking AMD would stay second fiddle to Intel for the rest of time. Turns out I am a terrible value investor.
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