The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs
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The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs
1–10 of 161 posts
Re: The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs
#2This is really interesting. If a cpu hardware vulnerability like spectre could be repaired by patching an fpga on the SOC that would be incredible. That type of functionality would overtake the entire cloud market in about 3 days.
Re: The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs
#3This is really interesting. If a cpu hardware vulnerability like spectre could be repaired by patching an fpga on the SOC that would be incredible. That type of functionality would overtake the entire cloud market in about 3 days.
It would also open up new attack vectors.
Re: The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs
#4> Intel, AMD, and many other companies use FPGAs to emulate their chips before manufacturing them.
Really? I'm assuming if this is true it can only be for tiny parts of the design, or they have some gigantic wafer-scale FPGA that they're not telling anyone about :-) Anyway I thought they mainly used software emulation to verify their designs.
Re: The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs
#5This is really interesting. If a cpu hardware vulnerability like spectre could be repaired by patching an fpga on the SOC that would be incredible. That type of functionality would overtake the entire cloud market in about 3 days.
I'm afraid it doesn't work like this. That would only be possible if the chip was using an FPGA fabric for the relevant parts of the design. For example if the L1 cache was implemented as an FPGA you could in theory patch around L1TF. But they wouldn't do that because it would be far slower/larger than implementing it directly as an ASIC.
Or you might imagine a chip that has an FPGA on the side (I expected Intel would ship this after acquiring Altera, but it never happened). But the FPGA would somehow have to have access to the paths that caused the vulnerability, which is highly unlikely, and would also be really slow compared to what they actually do which is hacking around it by microcode changes.
Re: The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs
#6> Intel, AMD, and many other companies use FPGAs to emulate their chips before manufacturing them. Really? I'm assuming if this is true it can only be for tiny parts of the design, or they have some gigantic wafer-scale FPGA that they're not telling anyone about :-) Anyway I thought they mainly used software emulation to verify their designs.
The largest FPGAs were reticle-busters when I used to work on them. Today I think the largest FPGAs use chiplet-style integration. Even with the inefficiency of an FPGA, many smaller chip designs can still fit on the largest FPGA.
Also, there are prototyping boards specifically built for emulation that integrate multiple FPGAs, although this does introduces a partitioning problem that has to be solved either manually or via dedicated emulator software.
Re: The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs
#7> Intel, AMD, and many other companies use FPGAs to emulate their chips before manufacturing them. Really? I'm assuming if this is true it can only be for tiny parts of the design, or they have some gigantic wafer-scale FPGA that they're not telling anyone about :-) Anyway I thought they mainly used software emulation to verify their designs.
The FPGA emulator for a chip I was working on involved an entire rack of FPGAs... for a single core.
Re: The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs
#8This is really interesting. If a cpu hardware vulnerability like spectre could be repaired by patching an fpga on the SOC that would be incredible. That type of functionality would overtake the entire cloud market in about 3 days.
FPGAs are too slow for that. I think you can get the clock rate up to about 600Mhz, but that is only for very small portions of the chip. Otherwise you run into timing issues. The clock speed for most of the chip will be significantly lower.
Re: The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs
#9I wonder if it is possible to add a (small) FPGA to a personal computer that could accelerate any specific software tasks (video/audio encoding, ML algorithms, compression, extra FPU capabilities) on user demand.
Re: The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs
#10This is really interesting. If a cpu hardware vulnerability like spectre could be repaired by patching an fpga on the SOC that would be incredible. That type of functionality would overtake the entire cloud market in about 3 days.
It would also open up new attack vectors.
That's the real nightmare. Now all of a sudden, you can program the CPU itself if you can access the update mechanism. CPUs being non-programmable is a feature as well as a bug.