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AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx
- jhallenworld 6y agoSo when Intel bought Altera their Stratix-10 was announced to be manufactured on Intel's fab. Predictably (Intel is not an open fab business) this massively delayed Stratix-10. At least AMD is fabless so there should be no such issue with Xilinx. Both Altera and Xilinx sell premium devices in terms of cost. If you make a high volume product based on an FPGA and care about profit margin, you are better off with Lattice (assuming their devices are performant enough for your application). It would be nice if any of these acquisitions made the FPGA prices more competitive, but I doubt it.
- danielEM 6y agoI'm surprised with that move of AMD, there is nothing special in Xilinx except their 'super protected' compilers. Dunno why people think that there is some sophisticated magic inside FPGA chips. GHz limits force companies to move more and more into parallel computing and FPGA might seem the right move, but it is only partially a right move because for computations we don't need to simulate gates, we need arithmetic operations thus rather something like Field Programming ALU Array (FPALUA)
- tails4e 6y agoIf its so trivial, why isn't there a decent competitor from all the startups? Even Altera with Intels moneybags has not managed to push past. Xilinx has a data center play, new HW with arrays of processors with local memory, RF integrated devices that are cutting edge (16x 10GSPS DACs in one chip for example). The compilers are advanced sure, but theres a lot in the silicon too...
- danielEM 6y ago@tails4e First - lets not mix integrated devices with pure FPGA. Second, electronics is trivial, very trivial even. Software isn't so much. Especially effective software that can automatically manage all interconnections between LUTs. It is not a rocket science tho, but significant entrance barrier to the market. That is why all the "FPGA" companies hold so much their binary formats as a secret and not open sourcing any tools.
- tails4e 6y agoThis is priceless, "electronics is trivial". You clearly saw a few logic gates and determined that was all there is to know. I would say ASIC design is more difficult than most SW, and you have to get it right first time, no patches or releases are coming to fix a bug you found after the chip is manufactured. As it happens the types of SW that are amongst the hardest are the algorithms that go into Place and Route. There are bitstream formats that have been either opened or hacked, yet there is no open source SW tool that even comes close to the performance or capability of a commercial place and route tool. The reason is its very difficult to create thst kind of SW.
- danielEM 6y ago@tails4e: > You clearly saw a few logic gates Well, perhaps 5 years of studying digital electronics engineering is worthless here... ;-) Saw a few logic gates when was 15, now I'm 40, and saw them already more than few ;-) Don't get me wrong, I'm not underestimating issues related with entire way from design to manufactured product. But FPGA in not any "magic" different in terms of how you design it and how you manufacture it from other digital ICs. In case of AMD, they have well established internal process for pushing from design to production of new ICs. Design of LUT or internal routing logic is really trivial, especially when given a perspective of designing something like RYZEN. I'm sure AMD could do it itself without significantly noticeable financial effort to the company. Given above - software (and possibly software patents) is the only real advantage that XILINX might bring to AMD with that deal (unless AMD has plans to develop on new markets - which I don't really think so).
- tails4e 6y agoFPGAs are way more than a few LUTs, the routing is complex, but must be efficient, there are many many hard blocks required to be useful (memories, dsp, transceivers, multi-standard IO, flexible programmable clock networks, clock generation with low latency over 10s of mm, etc.). There are way more blocks, but those are the basic ones, unless you want to design a 1980s FPGA of course! It is similar to how other ASICs are built, which is complex, and really complex at 7nm. I agree the RYZEN is also really complex, in a way a separate discipline - but the one point I come back to, many many startups have tried to build a better FPGA, and none have succeeded. If its so trivial, where is the RISC-V of the FPGA world?
- mhh__ 6y agoI would quite like an FPGA on board my CPU. Intel have what used to be called Altera, but they don't seem to have done much publicly with it in relation to their CPU business.
- mikepurvis 6y agoThe current model for interacting with an FPGA connected to a PC has it sitting on a peripheral card, on the other side of a PCIe bus. AFAIK there's no story for exposing higher level abstractions of these devices though the OS in a way that would allow them to be shared between different applications. How would you envision an "FPGA on board the CPU" differing from this? Would it still be a separate thing the way GPU is today, or would you see it more as like a new set of CPU instructions which enable little blobs of HDL to be somehow passed in and invoked, kind of like how a shader works today on GPUs?
- ThrowawayR2 6y agoThere's the possibility of a Xilinx Zynq with AMD x86 cores instead of the ARM cores in current Zynq versions, though I'm not sure that would really be interesting to anyone. Beyond that, there's been research in the past that envisions using a FPGA fabric as an execution unit within the CPU itself: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/emips/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/emips/ Intel hasn't pursued such a thing but that doesn't mean AMD couldn't.
- ip26 6y agoI think you'd have a hard time making a large FPGA actually part of a CPU die due to area. A peer on the memory bus ala CCIX on the other hand... Have you ever thought of building your own processor or maybe just defining your own machine instructions? With eMIPS now you can. Microcode strikes me as the natural way to define arbitrary instructions.
- rcxdude 6y agoI'm not so sure that's something which is really feasible from a design point of view. Everything involving instructions in the CPU is extremely performance critical and cross-cutting, so designing an interface which allows custom instructions without utterly destroying performance seems like quite a feat. I've a feeling the memory interface is a much more natural place for any integration (this is how it works on any existing FPGA + CPU chips)
- stripline 6y agoI'm unsure if this type of merger is good for consumers. Will AMD and Xilinx make better products together, or does competition drive them more efficiently. I tend to believe the latter.
- ip26 6y agoProbably comes down to whether you believe they compete with eachother. If they do compete, net loss in competition may be bad. If they don't, then two smaller companies gained scale & integration opportunities.
- nimish 6y agoConglomerates aren't particularly better for consumers fwiw
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- noisy_boy 6y agoThey don't seem to have a lot of overlap - AMD is mainly in the CPU business and Xilinx seems to be mainly focused on the FPGA space (JP Morgan used their hardware for Monte Carlo simulations[0]). This seems like a good fit. [0]: https://www.hpcwire.com/2011/07/13/jp_morgan_buys_into_fpga_supercomputing/ https://www.hpcwire.com/2011/07/13/jp_morgan_buys_into_fpga_...
- stripline 6y agoThey compete head to head in machine learning applications. Xilinx's latest Versal device added AI engines to accelerate ML further. In a situation where AMD owns Xilinx, I would think they execs would decide not to add those types of features to FPGAs to not compete against their own product. Edit: Actually I'm thinking of Nvidia, with their ML supported by TensorFlow. AMD is lacking here.
- sabujp 6y agoaccelerator boards/coprocessors for doing linear algebra
- ChuckMcM 6y agoHas Altera done that well for Intel's bottom line? I haven't been watching that closely. I would love an RFSOC type peripheral though. Sort of a Spectrum Processing Unit or SPU. If you extrapolate the cu:Signal work to its logical extreme of a purpose built auxiliary processing unit the possibilities are pretty amazing. [1] https://github.com/rapidsai/cusignal https://github.com/rapidsai/cusignal
- ksec 6y ago>Has Altera done that well for Intel's bottom line? I haven't been watching that closely. Altera is doing about the same before Intel's acquisition. Or may be losing to Xilinx a little ( within margin of error ) But one thing for certain is that it hasn't grow. ( At least on paper ) So it depends how you define well. Considering the performance of Intel's past acquisition ( Look at Infineon ) and the total failure of Intel Custom Foundry I think it is doing quite well.
- myself248 6y agoGoing back to 2006, Xilinx was making FPGAs that would sit in an Opteron socket and speak HyperTransport to the other CPU(s). I never heard much more about that, but I can imagine it might've been popular with certain specialized workloads, in an era before GPU compute took off, or perhaps workloads that don't fit GPUs well. I wonder if those specialized applications might be a small but important market.
- person_of_color 6y agoHFT, probably.
- jandrewrogers 6y agoGovernments were the consumers of that Opteron/FPGA hybrid product. It was an interesting idea but way too difficult to use for anything that would justify the cost. In practice, the FPGAs seemed to mostly be used to run crypto algorithms and codecs, which seems kind of disappointing. I vaguely recall some attempts at building ticker plants with them but I don’t know that it was ever actually used for that.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- eddyb 6y agoWhen I first heard the news, I started imagining EPYC with some core dies replaced with FPGAs connected to the Infinity Fabric. Really cool to hear this used to be a thing with HT (though long before chiplets), gives me some hope we'll see something like that again.
- samfisher83 6y ago5 years ago amd was a $2 stock and xilinx was a 50 dollar stock. Now amd is a 80 dollar stock and Xilinxis ~100 dollar stock. Xilinx market cap was 5x of amd. Even today xilinx generates more free cash than amd. Its kind of crazy how fast company values can change.
- dheera 6y agoIt's also weird because shareholders want stocks to grow indefinitely at an exponential rate, whereas there are a whole lot of companies like Xilinx that don't really need to grow all that much beyond just scaling to a number of gates that is useful to today's industry. Or Dropbox, which I really don't want them doing anything innovative except syncing my directories between machines until the end of time.
- ece 6y agoMature and stable companies tend to pay dividends, and investing in them is a fine thing to do for risk averse investors or portfolios.
- phkahler 6y agoYou gotta have a low P/E to pay dividends. It's the only sensible long term strategy. It gets ruined when people drive up stock prices playing the greater fool strategy.
- dis-sys 6y ago> Its kind of crazy how fast company values can change. what makes you believe that is has anything to do with "values"? ;)
- smartbit 6y agohttps://archive.is/016vq https://archive.is/016vq
- pabs3 6y agoOne can also just append this to WSJ URLs: ?mod=djemalertNEWS https://www.wsj.com/articles/amd-is-in-advanced-talks-to-buy-xilinx-11602205553?mod=djemalertNEWS https://www.wsj.com/articles/amd-is-in-advanced-talks-to-buy...
- mindfulhack 6y agoThis makes me feel a lot better in light of NVIDIA' recent ARM acquisition. I really don't see Intel in my future. Linux needs AMD.
- rektide 6y agoReally hoping the ARM acquisition can transform Nvidia from the inside, make them a responsible & cooperative partner. AMD seems to be doing well. Intel is indeed faltering, yes. Especially with process technology. Given what they've got to work with in the process department, they've been building neat good stuff. Xe just launched & in a mobile form factor is quite competitive, no longer leaving AMD APUs to dominate. These same mobile parts have far higher integration than anything AMD can offer, with dual USB4/TB4 ports good for 2 x 40Gbps. Intel has a range of neat things few others have. Intel has a pretty competent wifi that integrates nicely. Their new Tremot Atom cores are a great value, really nice light-weight cores, & scale up to 24 cores on expensive but interesting cellular radio platforms. Xeon-D is a wonderful connectivity platform that there is not much competition for. Alas Intel cancelled OmniPath, which was a brilliant thing to integrate & give away on server CPUs almost for free (~$100 on a >> $1000 chip). And alas the process tech really hampers big server cores, but intel has been getting more competitive. At this point, Linux need competition. Nvidia thus-far has never played well, Linux4Tegra and CUDA are walled gardens & driver support is otherwise awful, still no good way to run Wayland. AMD is doing great & Linux support is very high. But we kind of need Intel to keep AMD from growing lethargic & un-competitive, from exploiting their new market position as, well, better.
- localhost 6y agoFeels like a datacenter play for specialized compute. Given AMDs domination of server workloads in $/performance, seems like doubling down on that advantage. FPGA is already used today to offload SSL termination from the CPU.
- baybal2 6y agoStrange choice on performance-cost standpoint
- 01100011 6y agoYeah it feels like a move to try and keep up with Nvidia. With Xilinx, they might be able to offer a networking offload product similar to Mellanox. They can also focus on ML acceleration that is custom tailored to the task instead of trying to push GPUs. AMD really needs to focus on software if they want to catch Nvidia though.
- KingOfCoders 6y ago"ML acceleration that is custom tailored to the task" Hope for this, the Nvidia monopoly is hurting ML, I wished to have something else but am forced to buy Nvidias offerings b/c hardware and tool support.
- k0stas 6y agoIntel does not seem to have capitalized on the Altera acquisition but maybe that is also related to Intel's fab issues. From an operation perspective, this combines two non-overlapping TSMC customers that can potentially negotiate better wafer prices together. I assume that AMD has significantly higher wafer counts than Xilinx so this would primarily benefit the Xilinx business. From a technology perspective, this acquisition may succeed where the Intel/Altera acquisition fizzled due to AMD's chiplet approach. Swapping a processor core for an FPGA chiplet might be an "easy" win in some markets.
- rektide 6y ago> From a technology perspective, this acquisition may succeed where the Intel/Altera acquisition fizzled due to AMD's chiplet approach. Intel has been using EIMB quite effectively to allow for very interesting fpga configurability, letting purchasers pick from a variety of "front end" transcievers to match their app[1]. This doesn't combine multiple big processors, but is still a very interesting tech! Intel's also been working to standardize & accelerate mulit-chip connectivity, by donating their Advanced Interface Bus to the open group the CHIPS Alliance[2]. This saw a 2.0 draft emerge this summer. Agreed that Intel has been fairly ineffective at driving interesting new fpga adoption. There has been interesting work but it's hard to see what adoption has looked like. There is the Xeon 6138P for example, which uses a UPI link and dual 8x PCIe links of a 20 core xeon chip to talk to an on-package Arria 10GX[3]. I'm not a market researcher, but my guess is that adoption hasn't been stellar. I haven't seen any follow ups. I do hope there have been some interesting & good uses though! I feel like AMD will face similar challenges to adoption. Frankly, tech like Xe and Radeon seems more appealing to the world we live in; big gpus that can do bfloat16 &c. One of the big advantages of fpgas has been great connectivity, powerful transcievers & other i/o capabilities, which, if you put them in an existing platform socket, is probably going to squander some of those capabilities, I feel like? [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14211/intels-interconnected-future-chipslets-emib-foveros https://www.anandtech.com/show/14211/intels-interconnected-f... [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15434/intel-joins-chips-alliance-contributes-advanced-interface-bus https://www.anandtech.com/show/15434/intel-joins-chips-allia... [3] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-scalable-gold-6138p-with-integrated-fpga-shipping-to-vendors https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-scalab...
- farseer 6y agoIs there an open source/open standards FPGA? Equivalent of what RISC-V is for processors so to speak?
- pabs3 6y agoThere are a couple: http://blog.notdot.net/2012/10/Build-your-own-FPGA http://blog.notdot.net/2012/10/Build-your-own-FPGA https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24252737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24252737 https://github.com/haojunliu/OpenFPGA https://github.com/haojunliu/OpenFPGA https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-43.html https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-4...
- nine_k 6y agoImagine a reconfigurable GPU. How many f8, f16, f32, f64 units you want now? Do you need some special instructions like add+multiply, or some bit permutation? You can add some. There's no need to reconfigure it very fast, or per VM; not having to reboot the hypervisor OS would be enough. But it e.g. would allow to change the type of instances a particular server can offer, adjust to demand, and so overprovision less.
- amirhirsch 6y agoI think this is a terrible idea for the future of technology. AMD would not be existentially dependent on the FPGA market and the stack is so important to cutting-edge tech that it demands focused stewardship. It's clear something needs to change in FPGA land. Xilinx and Intel both produce abhorrent FPGA software causing project delays and cancellations of cutting-edge technology dependent on their devices. Xilinx probably needs an activist investor to force their software to move past the time in history when Java was something you put on your resume. Maybe AMD can be that, but I doubt it and an acquisition by AMD would likely result in the same abandonment we see from Intel towards Altera. Xilinx had an opportunity to be in the position NVidia is in today and it was not obvious in 2005 who was going to win the high performance computing (HPC) market because the inherent advantages that FPGAs had and still have today for high speed I/O, RAM throughput, and hard timing requirements. NVidia's CUDA, on the other hand, produces generally painlessly portable results, with easy improvement on new devices. They have essentially won in HPC application development. Fundamentally the FPGA companies need to adopt an open-source, cloud-first ethos towards their stacks and especially be focused on making agile low-level application development. Making a counter control some LEDs should be a 10 second process. Changing the clock speed should be a 1 seconds process. Adding a button to reset the counter should be a 1 second process. None of this is true. Good luck getting this to work within one day as a newbie on a vanilla machine. Good luck even installing Vivado and compiling any bitstream in one day (thank God they have AWS images -- good luck getting that going within 2 hours). Good luck coordinating with source control and generally merging work with a team. There was some hope when Intel bought Altera that the compilers engineering expertise might help improve virtual CPU stacks, or at least some investment in the usability of their software tools might have been thought of as a competitive advantage, but all the FPGA vendors have seriously dropped the ball on improving the eco-system with usable software. FPGA software is so bad that you have to justify a 6 month development cycle for something that should probably take a few days if things were even remotely sane. It's hard to enumerate all the examples of broken-ness but small changes end up taking a long time to re-build, things like inverting your reset in a module and then waiting two hours for trivial changes to resynthesize and place-and-route. (edit, two hours later the trivial reset polarity inversion failed timing, because it also required me to add synchronization stages to send the inverted reset signal across clock domains, shouldn't be doing this at night).
- ece 6y agoThis could work if AMD invested a ton in software like Intel has with OneAPI. But, if AMD really wants to get into a new market, it could try going into mobile. The 4000-series CPUs are great laptops CPUs which could go further down the scale, and over a couple generations maybe in phones too. Unlikely or stupid idea (RIP Broxton)? Still worth a shot, I feel.
- rudedogg 6y ago> This could work if AMD invested a ton in software like Intel has with OneAPI. Not my area of expertise, but I get the same feeling regarding their GPUs. Everything is built using CUDA, so AMD is out for ML/AI, etc.
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- lnsru 6y agoAt least Xilinx will be able to fall back to AMD’s amd64 or x86 architecture if NVIDIA will limit ARM core licensing. The new SoC products like ZynQ Ultrascale+ with ARM cores are really great.
- adrian_b 6y agoIt is really useful to include ARM cores in a FPGA, but Xilinx has remain stuck with completely obsolete cores (Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A72) since forever. The modern ARM cores, starting with Cortex-A55 (2017), use the corrected ISA ARMv8.2-A. On the ancient cores used by Xilinx, when writing multithreaded applications, it is annoying to lack atomic instructions. Yes, sure atomic instructions can be simulated with only the base ARMv8.0-A ISA, but it is not possible to guarantee worst case timings for the simulated atomics (because of retries).
- lnsru 6y agoFrom my perspective an ancient ARM core is better than 100 MHz Microblaze softcore. ARM core opens lots of new possibilities and I don’t need quirky high level synthesis.
- MayeulC 6y agoThe best outcome for me would be more open FPGA tools, maybe even documented bitstream format This could just be a strategic acquisition for internal purposes: I bet a lot of design and architecture validation is done on big FPGAs. Maybe they wanted some custom ones?
- st_goliath 6y ago> I bet a lot of design and architecture validation is done on big FPGAs. There was a talk at 32c3 (2015) by David Kaplan from AMD about developing and testing/verifying real world x86 CPU designs: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7171-when_hardware_must_just_work https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7171-when_hardware_must_just_wor... Around minute ~11/12 he briefly mentions (among other methods) emulation on massive FPGA workstations costing something in the order of $1M.
- tails4e 6y agoYep, emulation is huge. HAPS by Synoosys for example has a bunch of huge Xilinx FPGAs in there. I've never used one, but apparently it takes care of splitting the huge ASIC design over the array of FPGAs so it looks like a single chip, and can run at 100s of MHz, so way better than simulation that could be a few kHz at best
- panpanna 6y ago> I bet a lot of design and architecture validation is done on big FPGAs. It is. And the board and software used for this are so damn expensive they probably account for half of xilinx income despite the low quantities
- ksec 6y agoI have been looking forward to this happening for a long time. A quick search on my past comment shows that was 2016. And I remember checking Xilinx market cap last year and it was ~$30+ B, while AMD was only ~$50 B. I was thinking the chance of that ever happening is going to be very slim. ( I was an AMD Shareholder, but I never thought it would be $100B mark cap company, sold it all last year) Now AMD is at $100B+, while Xilinx is at Sub $30B. The market is crazy. But things has changed since 2016 - 2018. I used to see the move to FPGA as going offensive attack in the server space, now both AMD, and Intel are doing what ever they can to fence off ARM.
- desi_ninja 6y agoback in 2015, Dell bought EMC and Vmware. both combined had a way bjgger market cap than Dell. yet, Dell bought them by raising money from the market
- tails4e 6y agoI thought Xilinx would buy AMD when AMD was at $9. How the tables have sure turned.
- gigatexal 6y agoI sold a few shares when they were at 20 or some dollars a share thinking AMD would stay second fiddle to Intel for the rest of time. Turns out I am a terrible value investor.
- marketgod 6y agoDon't buy cheap stocks and hope they go up. Buy expensive stocks and watch them go up. You should sit on some TSLA for now also.
- phkahler 6y agoI thought about buying them at under $2 a few years ago but didnt... I probably would have cashed out half my share at $8 or $15 thinking the catchup to Intel was temporary. I'm glad they are doing well. There is no perfect crystal ball.
- KingOfCoders 6y agoHope with scaling Xilinx gets cheaper, very interesting!
- andy_ppp 6y agoIt's quite an interesting world where AMD has one of the 8 cores on a chip-let be a Xilinx FPGA. The only issue is they are not easy enough to program but maybe AMD can get out ahead of Nvidia on this one and define the software stack here in the way Nvidia did with CUDA.
- woofie11 6y agoVHDL / Verilog is very different, but not necessarily harder per-se. It's just people spend 4 years learning "normal" programming, and at best have a one-semester course which uses VHDL. But yes, a software stack would help.
- coreblocks 6y agoAs an FPGA dev, I tend to think of HDLs akin to HTML than “code”. It’s just a DSL to describe a graph. Actually pretty similar to how tensorflow is designed.
- andy_ppp 6y agoYes would expect units of execution and different types of signal processing to come a pre-built blobs.
- tails4e 6y agoThe issue I see is they are slow to compile. I write them daily and it's not that hard to lean when you grok the parallel nature, but generating the HW usually takes at least 10 to 30 mins for a medium sized block, that is a bit of a barrier to entry.
- FPGA_Throwaway 6y agoI'm really very bearish on this idea. When Intel bought Altera there were really 3 issues. The first was that they drove growth by bundling their FPGA stuff with their fabrication services - so like someone like Ericson could do half their design on FPGA and then slowly move to ASIC. That was good for Intel because it won them business, but it didn't really do anything for FPGAs. The second thing was bundling FPGAs into the same package as a CPU. There were two problems with this, firstly it's a load of dark silicon when you aren't using the FPGA part and you have to make a load of tricky decisions like "Am I going to design my thermals to let me run all the Xeon cores at max speed whilst running my FPGA". The other problem being that it's really bloody hard figuring out the programming model, where the FPGA wants a deterministic data flow and you've got these CPU nutters throwing memory at you out of order, stalling and screwing you up with really bizarre cache behaviour. Since the CPU guys designed the interface it leaves the FPGA developer an almost impossible task to build efficient processing pipelines. Finally we've got the moonshot - the idea that you could come up with a high level design language to programme FPGAs like software. Intel very heavily invested in this when they bought Altera but I'm still not seeing any forward progress on this, and let's be clear, Intel poured huge resources into making that happen. The last I heard they had over 100 engineers on that project and the sum total of their achievement is a handful of "partners" who wrote OpenCL/HLS/whatever and then worked with the engineers to go through a grueling process re-writing their code over and over and over until it looked like the RTL they already wanted. At one point Intel were going to re-write their entire FPGA video IP suite in HLS, I don't know how they went, but the acquisition of Omnitek probably wasn'ta good sign. It's been 4 years since the acquisition, and they were working on it long before then. The project is still basically just a load of marketing guff on their website that no one can actually use. I would say with the innevitable restructuring that Intel will have to do due to their various other fuck ups, this project is on thin ice. The problem is that AMD is so likely to fall into the trap of points 2 and 3, and we're going to lose the final big independent FPGA company so that AMD can kill themselves trying to compete with Nvidia. And the real danger is that whilst all that's happening, actual innovation will disappear in the FPGA space. Xilinx's ACAPs are actually interesting (one way of solving the programming model), but Intel's last piece of innovation in the FPGA space died with the failure of hyperflex.
- 6y ago
- antman 6y agoAs a value multiplying investment AMD should buy a company that has programmers that can code a half-decent CUDA compatible layer for its graphics cards.
- danielscrubs 6y agoCuda will suddenly change and then the AMD implementation will look old. AMD is in a position to take over via LLVM open source extensions instead of CUDA.
- salicideblock 6y agoI would love to see that happen. But it will also depend on the outcome of Oracle v. Google regarding the copyrightability of APIs
- giancarlostoro 6y agoIf they can provide an alternative towards the same goal they dont necessarily have to copy the API just make their own reliable API. I just wonder if the concept of CUDA is patented in regards to GPUs.
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoThey already have ROCm, just that it lacks Windows compatibility.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoThanks! I was hoping somebody would steer me in the right direction if they had something. I wonder when AMD will focus on making things that are developer focused, I know for example that Intel has their own C++ compiler, not sure if AMD has one, though I heard it mentioned they've been contributing to LLVM. If the tooling developers use is enhanced for your hardware platform it will make it almost a no brainer to use for new projects.
- supernova87a 6y agoAside from the technology, this merger probably means a bunch more downward pressure on jobs/salaries for silicon hardware people doesn't it? The consolidations in the chip industry generally have produced an oversupply of redundant roles after mergers, such that wages in silicon jobs are much lower than in software, right? This only adds more.
- MrXOR 6y agoIntel bought Altera for $16.7 billion. AMD wants to acquire Xilinx for $30 billion. Is the future FPGA or FPGA-CPU hybrid chips?