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Can you give any examples of how FPGAs helped SGI? I'm aware that a certain Voldemort-like .gov liked them at one time, but I never saw any uptake in the real

Can you give any examples of how FPGAs helped SGI? I'm aware that a certain Voldemort-like .gov liked them at one time, but I never saw any uptake in the real world. Intel is a volume player; this makes FPGAs a bit of a head-scratcher, since in the Grand Scheme, products might get prototyped as FPGAs, but they jump to high-volume, higher-performance ASICs ASAP.

Rarebox 11y ago
Bing is using them: http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/09/03/microsoft-using-fpgas-speed-bing-search/ http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/09/03/microsoft-using-fpg... Using FPGAs allows new features and optimizations to be tested and productionized (almost) as quickly as regular software. Upgrading to a newer design is essentially free and instantaneous, compared to expensive and time-consuming process of producing new chips.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
AMD was in the lead with the semi-custom processors that combined their CPU's plus custom logic for customers. That apparently was a huge business. Intel started doing it, too, IIRC. There's an overlap between those buying high-end CPU's and semi-custom stuff that might appreciate reconfigurable logic on-chip. It's a nice alternative given you get huge speed boost without capital investment of ASIC's and can keep tweaking it to optimize or fix mistakes.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
I forgot to answer the other part of your question because I was skimming. The FPGA's didn't help SGI I don't think. They were just too hard to use and the nodes were expensive. However, SGI did the right thing at the wrong time period: connecting FPGA's to memory shared with CPU's over an ultra-high-speed, low-latency, cache-coherent interconnect. This allowed FPGA co-processing to do far more than it ever could on PCI cards where the PCI overhead was significant for many applications. Just like how NUMA performance trumped clusters over Ethernet or even Infiniband in many cases. So, I was citing them as the opening chapter to the book Intel's about to be writing on how to do FPGA coprocessors. Hopefully. Meanwhile, FPGA's plugging into HyperTransport or an inexpensive NUMA would still be A Good Thing to have. :)

Rarebox 11y ago

Bing is using them: http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/09/03/microsoft-using-fpgas-speed-bing-search/ http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/09/03/microsoft-using-fpg... Using FPGAs allows new features and optimizations to be tested and productionized (almost) as quickly as regular software. Upgrading to a newer design is essentially free and instantaneous, compared to expensive and time-consuming process of producing new chips.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

AMD was in the lead with the semi-custom processors that combined their CPU's plus custom logic for customers. That apparently was a huge business. Intel started doing it, too, IIRC. There's an overlap between those buying high-end CPU's and semi-custom stuff that might appreciate reconfigurable logic on-chip. It's a nice alternative given you get huge speed boost without capital investment of ASIC's and can keep tweaking it to optimize or fix mistakes.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

I forgot to answer the other part of your question because I was skimming. The FPGA's didn't help SGI I don't think. They were just too hard to use and the nodes were expensive. However, SGI did the right thing at the wrong time period: connecting FPGA's to memory shared with CPU's over an ultra-high-speed, low-latency, cache-coherent interconnect. This allowed FPGA co-processing to do far more than it ever could on PCI cards where the PCI overhead was significant for many applications. Just like how NUMA performance trumped clusters over Ethernet or even Infiniband in many cases. So, I was citing them as the opening chapter to the book Intel's about to be writing on how to do FPGA coprocessors. Hopefully. Meanwhile, FPGA's plugging into HyperTransport or an inexpensive NUMA would still be A Good Thing to have. :)