4 ms·

The reuse of their network infrastructure with this approach is elegant, BUT it takes about half of the FPGA to support the network pass through and lightweight

The reuse of their network infrastructure with this approach is elegant, BUT it takes about half of the FPGA to support the network pass through and lightweight transport layer. FPGAs are about as expensive as high end CPUs, can you afford to buy a high end server and burn half the cores on your OS? On the flip side, if Microsoft can really eat that cost and offer FPGA space as a public cloud service, as an FPGA dev, I'd rather pay to play than bust 5K on a high end dev board.

astrodust 10y ago
FPGAs are really expensive today, but I think we're starting to see a real shift in production volumes, especially with Intel jumping in, which might rapidly cut costs on them. Exciting opportunities ahead for those that can take advantage of hardware like this.
- jackyinger 10y ago
  It certainly is exciting. Tech that began by replacing discrete logic ICs (TI 7400 series) is getting powerful enough to pack a computing punch. Look up systolic array architectures for matrix multiplication if you're not already familiar. They play nice with FPGAs (which are design space limited in comparison to ASICs). And can efficiently implement algorithms that are prone to combinatoric explosion by amortizing expenisve off chip memory accesses over multiple operations as the data passes trough the sys array. If the FPGA manufactures want to open the advantages to all comers they'd make their design software free (as in beer, not freedom) an pAy for it with silicon sales.
  - dom0 10y ago
    > It certainly is exciting. Tech that began by replacing discrete logic ICs (TI 7400 series) is getting powerful enough to pack a computing punch. <nitpick> Those were PALs, basically fuse-programmed logic-in-tables. Even a single of the later CPLDs could already replace a board or two filled with SSI logic. FPGAs took that to replacing an entire cabinet.

astrodust 10y ago

FPGAs are really expensive today, but I think we're starting to see a real shift in production volumes, especially with Intel jumping in, which might rapidly cut costs on them. Exciting opportunities ahead for those that can take advantage of hardware like this.

jackyinger 10y ago
It certainly is exciting. Tech that began by replacing discrete logic ICs (TI 7400 series) is getting powerful enough to pack a computing punch. Look up systolic array architectures for matrix multiplication if you're not already familiar. They play nice with FPGAs (which are design space limited in comparison to ASICs). And can efficiently implement algorithms that are prone to combinatoric explosion by amortizing expenisve off chip memory accesses over multiple operations as the data passes trough the sys array. If the FPGA manufactures want to open the advantages to all comers they'd make their design software free (as in beer, not freedom) an pAy for it with silicon sales.
- dom0 10y ago
  > It certainly is exciting. Tech that began by replacing discrete logic ICs (TI 7400 series) is getting powerful enough to pack a computing punch. <nitpick> Those were PALs, basically fuse-programmed logic-in-tables. Even a single of the later CPLDs could already replace a board or two filled with SSI logic. FPGAs took that to replacing an entire cabinet.