71–80 of 115 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
I would love to see that happen. But it will also depend on the outcome of Oracle v. Google regarding the copyrightability of APIs
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
How would accessing the FPGA through registers instead of instruction opcodes do anything to address the issue of needing to ensure that the FPGA is currently configured to behave in the manner expected by the current process, as opposed to the FPGA still being configured to suit the process that was running before the last context switch?
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 i…
FPGAs are such a useful tool for a variety of engineering (and product) problems that fall in-between general computing and ASICs, unfortunately these problems are usually so disparate in nature that you can't target them as a single market. So the datacenter / HLS game will keep going until either a viable solution for the programming model is found or until everyone gives up on it once and for all and decides that FPGAs should go back to their niche (which is fine by me)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would love to see that happen. But it will also depend on the outcome of Oracle v. Google regarding the copyrightability of APIs
If they can provide an alternative towards the same goal they dont necessarily have to copy the API just make their own reliable API. I just wonder if the concept of CUDA is patented in regards to GPUs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they can provide an alternative towards the same goal they dont necessarily have to copy the API just make their own reliable API. I just wonder if the concept of CUDA is patented in regards to GPUs.
They already have ROCm, just that it lacks Windows compatibility.
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.
Really cool to hear this used to be a thing with HT (though long before chiplets), gives me some hope we'll see something like that again.
I'm unsure if this type of merger is good for consumers. Will AMD and Xilinx make better products together, or does competition drive them more efficiently. I tend to believe the latter.
They don't seem to have a lot of overlap - AMD is mainly in the CPU business and Xilinx seems to be mainly focused on the FPGA space (JP Morgan used their hardware for Monte Carlo simulations[0]). This seems like a good fit. [0]: https://www.hpcwire.com/2011/07/13/jp_morgan_buys_into_fpga_...
Edit: Actually I'm thinking of Nvidia, with their ML supported by TensorFlow. AMD is lacking here.
I'm unsure if this type of merger is good for consumers. Will AMD and Xilinx make better products together, or does competition drive them more efficiently. I tend to believe the latter.
Probably comes down to whether you believe they compete with eachother. If they do compete, net loss in competition may be bad. If they don't, then two smaller companies gained scale & integration opportunities.