3 ms·

I'm a neophyte to this area, but did I read this correctly, the stratix 10 SoC comes with an ARM cortex chip? Intel sells solutions with ARM chips?

• onion2k 9y ago
  ARM don't make chips. They design them. Then they license the designs to chip users, who in turn get chip manufacturers to make them. Intel make lots of ARM chips (as well as their own in-house designs).
  • detaro 9y ago
    I remember years ago (2010-ish?) Intel being claimed as the largest ARM customer at the time (as in, the entity paying the most license fees to ARM).
  • simonh 9y ago
    Intel only recently signed a manufacturing deal with ARM in 2016, I'm not sure how extensive it is though. I'm only aware of LG taking advantage of it until now. Intel used to both design and manufacture their own line of ARM SOCs back in the 2000s under the XScale brand, but they sold it to Marvell in 2006.
• zubairlk 9y ago
  Intel bought FPGA maker Altera a while back. That is how they acquired an FPGA line of products. Some Altera Stratix 10 do have ARM cores in them.
• wyldfire 9y ago
  Yes, absolutely. AFAICT this is an Intel-branded design from the Altera acquisition. Pairing an FPGA with an ARM host CPU is a reasonably common thing.
• baybal2 9y ago
  It may be a surprise for you, but intel once had bridge chips with multiple arm cores working as audio codecs and ATA controllers back a decade ago.
  • monocasa 9y ago
    They also just straight up sold ARM SoCs, with ARM cores as the main processor in their StrongARM days.
• aseipp 9y ago
  The Stratix 10 SX has an onboard AArch64 ARM core, correct. Previous systems used ARMv7. Most FPGAs with a built-in system-on-chip you'll see have ARM cores attached, as well, such as Xilinx boards. Intel isn't unfamiliar with selling ARM chips, but in this case -- Intel acquired Altera, who did this originally. You can find one-or-two FPGA SoCs from Intel with actual x86 chips instead, though. But the idea is that the ARM cores normally just act as your "control plane" -- manage the FPGA, watch power usage, reload configurations, monitor & reporting metrics, etc etc. So they aren't the main attraction, of course. In the long run, Intel will be moving to discrete PCIe FPGA cards for data center usage, as well as fusing the FPGAs directly on-chip, alongside the Xeon cores for extremely high-end stuff. That's where you'll find products like Stratix 10 (aside from a few other places.) So in datacenter-oriented offerings, you may not see the ARM cores floating around that much.
• std_throwaway 9y ago
  They did so for quite a while but somehow didn't really take off. As I understood intel has the best FABs. About half the advantage over AMD lies purely in the production technology. ARM is said to be more energy efficient than x86. Yet, when intel makes ARM chips you don't hear them outperforming everything else. I wonder why.