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Intel 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 com
by k0stas 6y ago
Intel 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...
- why_only_15 6y agoLooks to be EMIB not EIMB
- guiriduro 6y agoWasn't there another angle with the Intel/Altera tie-up - to more closely integrate the x86 architecture with top-end FPGA tech, and to relegate ARM to embedded SOC (not kill it, but equally not pour R&D budget into it) ?