Intel announces new FPGA families • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel announces new FPGA families

#61

Post by buildbot » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 7:18 PM UTC

brooksbp wrote: post #35

amirhirsch wrote: post #26

The Intel Direct RF FPGAs are pretty spectacular. They report 64GSPS and 25GHz instantaneous bandwidth directly into FPGA fabric (no JESD) which greatly exceeds any other competitors’ IC offerings on the market. I wonder what they will cost: if their high-end 8ch device is <$16K then they will annihilate the competition (I’m able to get $2K per channel for large multichannel direct RF systems 1Ghz instantaneous all t…

I can only imagine how long it will take the fitter to pnr these insanely wide busses. Maybe a 13th gen CPU overclocked to 8GHz would be handy.

Days at least. P&R is NP hard I believe. Force directed placement or simulated annealing is slow and random :/

Re: Intel announces new FPGA families

#62

Post by buildbot » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 7:19 PM UTC

SilverBirch wrote: post #60

FullyFunctional wrote: post #48

The announcement is surprisingly lacking in architectural updates; it looks like the same Agilex on a new process. Has Intel killed innovation? ADD: last time I witnessed something actually new and interesting: https://www.efinixinc.com/technology.html

FPGA innovation is very incremental. The hyperflex architecture is basically the single biggest innovation in FPGA fabric, and it basically didn’t pay off. Altera also smashed up against the wall of Intel 10nm. So all in all, some reduced precision for AI and some EMIB enabled stuff isn’t too bad.

Needs better tools to take advantage of it, right now using hyperflex (registers on long routing lines to automatically pipeline your designs) is quite difficult from what I have heard.

Re: Intel announces new FPGA families

#63

Post by buildbot » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 7:21 PM UTC

snvzz wrote: post #29

I'll avoid these chips merely because they don't have support in the Open Source FPGA stack (yosys/nextpnr), whereas other chips do.

FPGAs would be so much more useful if AMD(Xilinx)/Intel(Altera) just gave up trying to build there own tools and instead supported F4FPGA: https://f4pga.org

Re: Intel announces new FPGA families

#64

Post by muziq » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 8:24 PM UTC

galangalalgol wrote: post #57

foldor wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but recreating the PS2 is an order of magnitude more complicated than a PS1, which is still a massive undertaking for an individual. Even supposing we had a cheap enough FPGA, who would write the HDL to simulate a PS2?

The ps1 cpu was just a mips. Building a mips cpu with an fpga is a normal required undergrad project for a cs degree or it was a couple decades ago. I was feeling dismissive until I looked at the specs for the gpu and spu... That was some serious work for the ps1. The ps2 had that odd cell processor, or emotion engine whatever you want to call it. Its still basically multiple simplified mips cores but now all the stu…

PS3 was Cell processor.. PS2 Emotion Engine..

Re: Intel announces new FPGA families

#65

Post by NovemberWhiskey » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 8:34 PM UTC

dtx1 wrote: post #6

Can someone estimate the power of these new FPGAs? Is a MisterFPGA with n64/PS2 emulation in range?

When you talk about "mid-range" in Intel's current product line up, that usually means the Arria 10 line. Those are typically around $1,000 for just the FPGA package itself, so I don't think we're realistically talking about something that's going to make meaningful impact on the hobbyist emulation market.

Re: Intel announces new FPGA families

#66

Post by snvzz » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 8:55 PM UTC

buildbot wrote: post #63

snvzz wrote: post #29

I'll avoid these chips merely because they don't have support in the Open Source FPGA stack (yosys/nextpnr), whereas other chips do.

FPGAs would be so much more useful if AMD(Xilinx)/Intel(Altera) just gave up trying to build there own tools and instead supported F4FPGA: https://f4pga.org

Note that some vendors actually do. QuickLogic mentioned there was contributed by the company making these FPGAs.

Re: Intel announces new FPGA families

#67

Post by galangalalgol » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 9:15 PM UTC

muziq wrote: post #64

galangalalgol wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ps1 cpu was just a mips. Building a mips cpu with an fpga is a normal required undergrad project for a cs degree or it was a couple decades ago. I was feeling dismissive until I looked at the specs for the gpu and spu... That was some serious work for the ps1. The ps2 had that odd cell processor, or emotion engine whatever you want to call it. Its still basically multiple simplified mips cores but now all the stu…

PS3 was Cell processor.. PS2 Emotion Engine..

Ah! The ps2 was still like 8 cores right?

Re: Intel announces new FPGA families

#68

Post by SilverBirch » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 9:44 PM UTC

buildbot wrote: post #62

SilverBirch wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FPGA innovation is very incremental. The hyperflex architecture is basically the single biggest innovation in FPGA fabric, and it basically didn’t pay off. Altera also smashed up against the wall of Intel 10nm. So all in all, some reduced precision for AI and some EMIB enabled stuff isn’t too bad.

Needs better tools to take advantage of it, right now using hyperflex (registers on long routing lines to automatically pipeline your designs) is quite difficult from what I have heard.

Yeah, this was one of those situations where the hardware guys create a super cool thing that requires amazingly complex software to take advantage, and it turns out the software guys aren't going to solve all the problems you created.

Re: Intel announces new FPGA families

#69

Post by FullyFunctional » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 7:02 AM UTC

SilverBirch wrote: post #68

buildbot wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Needs better tools to take advantage of it, right now using hyperflex (registers on long routing lines to automatically pipeline your designs) is quite difficult from what I have heard.

Yeah, this was one of those situations where the hardware guys create a super cool thing that requires amazingly complex software to take advantage, and it turns out the software guys aren't going to solve all the problems you created.

Indeed, that was the downfall of Tabula (sniff)

Re: Intel announces new FPGA families

#70

Post by Aromasin » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 8:42 AM UTC

naikrovek wrote: post #24

radicalbyte wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would easily eventually get into volumes of 2-3 million a year if you could get something out which is powerful enough for PS2 level re-creation. The MiSTER project is already inspiring a generation to learn how to program FPGAs, those skills could be applied to improve performance in a lot of applications.

I'd like to know how many MiSTer owners there are in the world. Part of me wants to say it's a lot, and part of me wants to say that the retro gaming community is peanuts compared to other FPGA consumers.

I suspect the same. My view is that the MiSTer FPGA crowd is very loud in the subreddits and discord channels of the world, but in reality most people using FPGAs in any significant capacity are much more tight lipped about it.