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Going 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 tha
by myself248 6y ago
Going 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.