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What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service
- cannonpr 10y agoWhile it's nice finally having access to FPGA's on the cloud, it's still a shame that there isn't much going on with Open source development on FPGA's, on either the toolset or libraries/modules. Though this is largely due to manufacturer hostility. Maybe wider access and adoption might finally do something about this situation.
- boxerab 10y agoYes, agree. Also, SDKs are quite expensive - while GPU vendors give theirs away for free. This might be one reason for relatively low adoption vs GPU.
- planteen 10y agoI don't think that is it. The tools aren't open source free, but they are dollar free. Xilinx is the leader in FPGAs and their tools are free. Lattice tools are also free. Not sure about Altera, who is #2. I've worked multiple places that shipped products using only the FPGA vendor's free offerings. The FPGA vendors see the tools as a way to sell silicon.
- spilk 10y agoAltera was acquired by Intel last year and they dropped the Altera brand - they are now Intel FPGA.
- moflome 10y agoI'm curious what workloads you would want to see run on the FPGAs that would justify a more open platform? As it is, I think Amazon's approach for AMI Reserved Instance Marketplace [0] sales makes sense for the AFI packages -- I would think it would make sense for a vendor to develop, debug & maintain the accelerators I'm aware of. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/
- phamilton 10y agoI've used FPGAs for image processing. While OpenCL does accelerate this, at the end of the day it's still largely General Purpose Computation on a GPU. I'd love to be able to install a suite of Special Purpose cores for image manipulation, for example. Especially one that works with imagemagick, so that all the various libs compiled against it would just work.
- wcrichton 10y agoStanford has a research group specifically on this issue: https://aha.stanford.edu/ https://aha.stanford.edu/
- BuuQu9hu 10y agohttp://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/
- ngsayjoe 10y agoThere is OpenCores the equivalent of Open Source for Verilog/VHDL http://opencores.org/ http://opencores.org/.
- rwmj 10y agoIs anyone doing open hardware FPGAs (I don't mean reverse engineering proprietary FPGAs, I mean implementing new silicon)? Recently a RISC-V company implemented a simple 32 bit CPU on the ancient TSMC 180nm process. NRE was apparently quite affordable and turnaround time was a few months. So perhaps a startup could work on implementing a 1990s-era PLD in the same process, just as a starting point to judge market demand.
- BuuQu9hu 10y agohttps://github.com/haojunliu/OpenFPGA/ https://github.com/haojunliu/OpenFPGA/
- brian-armstrong 10y agoIf you're looking to learn an HDL on an FPGA, it's probably still cheaper and easier to just buy your own, maybe something like http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-board-artix-7-fpga-development-board-for-makers-and-hobbyists/ http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-board-artix-7-fpga-develop... ($99). And for that matter, you can also get started by just using a sim and no FPGA for free
- zw123456 10y agoI agree, the devkit boards are very reasonable now days. I think the part that should be in the cloud is the SDK's. The synthesis is the most computationally expensive part and you could cut compile times down by an order of magnitude if you could run you dev on big iron.
- vvanders 10y agoIf you don't care about the DSP units you can pick up a CPLD kit for ~$20 [1]. [1] http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/lattice-semiconductor-corporation/LCMXO3L-6900C-S-EVN/220-1935-ND/5039065 http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/lattice-semiconduct...
- duskwuff 10y agoYou can also get a "real" -- albeit small -- FPGA from Lattice for $25: http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/lattice-semiconductor-corporation/ICE40HX1K-STICK-EVN/220-2656-ND/4289604 http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/lattice-semiconduct... The Arty is a much more capable board, though.
- pluglus 10y agoFPGA newbie here; How does this relate to toolsets that Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor Graphics and others make for chip design? Would you use tools from these companies to design VHDL / Verilog for the 'FPGAs as a service' or is this at all related?
- wmf 10y agoYes, you use EDA tools to synthesize (compile) and debug VHDL/Verilog code for FPGAs, although Xilinx provides their own tools.
- nraynaud 10y agoThose tools are very close to silicium level design tools. I guess the smartest application of FPGAs on EC2 would be for FPGA design tools, they are incredibly slow.
- mmaunder 10y ago"Each FPGA contains approximately 2.5 million logic elements and approximately 6,800 Digital Signal Processing (DSP) engines." Can an FPGA guru provide a real-world example of the kind of processing power this provides?
- homero 10y agoJust from experience. Bitcoin mining 10x from gpu to fpga so there's a lot of potential. But then again we aren't even using gpgpu in web apps.
- nraynaud 10y agoI do :)
- pjc50 10y agoIt's very difficult to relate to conventional CPUs because the model is so different; each of those DSP engines could be said to correspond to a lane in a SIMD instruction. However, they're usually set up for integer maths rather than floating point. So you could say that it's equivalent to 1,700 Pentiums running MMX instructions. But it's still limited to one or maybe two DRAM interfaces, so your data has to be very "local" and preferably streaming through the system to get that kind of throughput.
- mmaunder 10y agoFor reference (30 November): https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/developer-preview-ec2-instances-f1-with-programmable-hardware/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/developer-preview-ec2-insta...
- askvictor 10y agoPerhaps we should rename them to CPGA (Cloud programmable) - Field programmable seems a bit archaic when they're cloud-based