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With things like AWS F1 instances[1], it seems anyone who wants to experiment with, or make production use of FPGA accelerated computing can do so without a lar
by gricardo99 9y ago
With things like AWS F1 instances[1], it seems anyone who wants to experiment with, or make production use of FPGA accelerated computing can do so without a large capital or time investment in the hardware platform itself.
That being said, as many others have pointed out in this thread, there are still tool-chain and conceptual hurdles to doing this effectively. If/when FPGA acceleration becomes more common-place, I think you'll see tighter integration of the FPGA with the server hardware platforms, perhaps to the point of it being on-package, if not on-die. The demand of the marketplace will dictate the pace and level of integration. That is of course also if the major CPU makers are in-tune and responsive to these market demands.
I wouldn't be shocked if Amazon, Google, etc... were designing their own server CPU chipsets from scratch, to include some features they can't get from Intel/AMD. But at least with the Intel acquisitions of Nervana[2] and Altera[3], I'd say Intel seems to be aware of evolving computing needs.
But the major data center operators have been building their own solutions further up the "hardware stack" for some time. Amazon, Facebook and Google have bypassed the major equipment makers (Dell, HP, Cisco, EMC, etc...) and gone ahead with their own server and switch hardware designs to suite their specific datacenter needs[4].
1 - https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/
2 - https://www.recode.net/2016/8/9/12413600/intel-buys-nervana--350-million https://www.recode.net/2016/8/9/12413600/intel-buys-nervana-...
3 - https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-completes-acquisition-of-altera/ https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-completes-acq...
4 - https://www.wired.com/2016/03/google-facebook-designing-open-source-data-center-gear-together/ https://www.wired.com/2016/03/google-facebook-designing-open...