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I'm not sure I agree with the idea that Intel is going to make these folks work on something else because FPGAs don't grow that much. That makes little sense; I
by lvh 10y ago
I'm not sure I agree with the idea that Intel is going to make these folks work on something else because FPGAs don't grow that much. That makes little sense; Intel isn't really hurting for more employees, and the FPGA engineers can't necessarily be made to be productive on the higher-growth sections cited.
Instead, it makes a lot more sense that Intel is going to try and make that market more lucrative and larger instead. As a major chip manufacturer, they're in a great position to ship FPGAs to tons of new customers. Chicken-and-egg problems (you don't FPGA until you need to because it's not available) have made FPGAs a niche element. However, OpenPOWER/CAPI have demonstrated that you can get huge benefits from slapping FPGAs to existing general purpose compute.
So; TL;DR: I don't think it makes sense to assume Intel is just going to assume that market will stay what it is. Instead, they think they can make that market better, and do more than Altera/Xilinx can do individually. In that light, a purchase makes perfect sense.
(Disclaimer: I work for a company involved in OpenPOWER/OpenCompute and has shipped hardware that does this.)
- Retric 10y agoFPGA's are always significantly worse than dedicated HW. To sell them in bulk you need to be able to replace a wide range of chips you don't need at the same time with a good enough solution. At the same time you need enough speed you can't just simulate things on a general purpose processor. That's a fairly narrow band and the real issue with FPGA's. A synthesizer for example seems like a good fit, but well general processes are fast enough. If we had a wider range of video codec's that might work, but again general purpose processors are good and dedicated hardware can help for the mainstream codec's. Any ideas?
- dv_dt 10y agoAnything that is needed to run in a pipelined data flow - particularly if the cpu processing of that data would be non-trivial. One example might be video processing (the kind that might go in all those automated cars on the horizon). You might have one set of algorithms at initial release, but in future releases one might change them. Other examples might be crypto or compression/decompression, transcoding ..
- tarpherder 10y agoWouldn't a GPU outperform a FPGA in those cases?
- dv_dt 10y agoIt depends - for outright throughput for something the GPU is good at perhaps, but if Intel is coupling the FPGA tightly to their CPU and it has access to the memory bus and maybe some level of cache, then (I'm really speculating here) it might be very advantageous for situations where you have small chunks of data that you want to operate on with very low latency (lower latency by at least two PCIe transfers, to & from the GPU, and likely another memory transfer between the card local memory and the GPU). Then there are also likely a some set of functions you can directly implement on an FPGA that a GPU simply didn't elect to implement in its hardware or would need to compose out of a number of operations.
- ae_keji 10y agoMaybe easy open source implementations of GPUs/video hardware, for the libre everything types.