19 ms·
AMD to Acquire Xilinx
- andy_ppp 6y agoCould programmable AI chips compete with Graphics Cards and TPUs or is it futile to try?
- ninjaoxygen 6y agoIn the stock trading world, HFT on FPGA is closer to the edge than GPU / TPU solutions and they are using ML models, if you count that as AI. When the logic and the NIC are on the same hardware, it's really fast. An ASIC would be even faster, but you can't really iterate on that.
- heliophobicdude 6y agoPerhaps they would not make good competition. FPGAs have been known to be slower than ASICs. But then again, perhaps some other company will find a good use for rapidly changing IC design.
- galangalalgol 6y agoTheir new versal line puts a tpu on the die with the fpga. Great for inference, especially if you want to use the fpga to quickly extract features in the fpga and infer from feature space.
- hehetrthrthrjn 6y agoThis is a smart move, reflecting Intel's own, with an eye to the datacenter where the FPGA is seen as having a bright future.
- baybal2 6y ago> This is a smart move, reflecting Intel's own, with an eye to the datacenter where the FPGA is seen as having a bright future. What in the world FPGAs have to do in a datacentre?
- sadiq 6y agoMicrosoft have been using them in Bing and other projects for a while: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-catapult/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-cat...
- unsigner 6y agoWord on the street is that this was a vanity project of a VP, and never resulted in performance levels that couldn't be achieved with a little bit of focused optimization of boring old CPU work (threading + SIMD).
- saagarjha 6y agoAren’t they already widely used as NICs? And I many places are beginning to offer them for ML workloads and such.
- detaro 6y agoI don't think "widely", maybe in a few niches? "SmartNICs" are becoming a bit of a thing again, but those are mostly not FPGA-based as far as I know.
- coldtea 6y agoThe "datacentre" mentioned is not necessarily an enterprise datacenter or a web app backend datacenter. Think ML, networking and other such uses...
- einpoklum 6y agoBecause an FPGA lets you optimize your "hardware" solution to a computing problem without the hassle of fabricating a chip of your own (although the performance with an FPGA is much lower than with a custom chip).
- ATsch 6y agoThere's been a recent trend to increasingly move more compute capabilities into NICs. This has been going on for a while, but has gained a new dimension with cloud providers. For example, with their "Nitro" system, AWS can more or less run their Hypervisor entirely on the NIC and completely offload the network and storage virtualization from their servers. This development is likely to continue. FPGAs are going to play a significant part in that because they allow the customers to reconfigure this hardware according to their needs.
- voxadam 6y agoI'd love to know why Intel chose to buy Altera instead of the industry leader Xilinx.
- hehetrthrthrjn 6y agoIt may have been Xilinx not wanting to get into bed with Intel. Xilinx may have wanted a degree of technical independence or freedom to carry out their own strategy that was not forthcoming from Intel.
- andrew_gen 6y agoI believe Altera was already manufacturing chips using Intel process prior to acquisition, while Xilinx is using TSMC?
- saagarjha 6y agoYes, I believe they switched off of TSMC in 2013 or so.
- ksec 6y agoBoth Altera and Xilinx were on TSMC. Altera wanted an Edge over Xilinx, at the time Intel was committing ( on paper ) to their Custom Foundry. Altera switched and bet to Intel Custom Foundry. Nothing ever worked out with Intel Custom Foundry because they were not used to working with others on Foundry Process. Intel thought the problem was with Altera not being part of company and they had too much cash so they might as well buy them for better synergy. And it did, getting internal access seems to have ( on paper or slides ) speed things up with product launches and roadmap, until they hit the Intel 10nm fiasco.
- saagarjha 6y agoHas Intel done much with Altera? I haven’t heard much of anything come out of that partnership. (Then again, I’m not plugged in to this stuff.)
- mastax 6y agoI don't use FPGAs (tooling is too poor, languages are bad, up-front costs are high) but I hang out on FPGA forums and the overwhelming consensus has been bad. Chipmakers and especially high-performance chipmakers have always been focused on high-volume and/or high-margin customers, but the Intel acquisition has made Altera worse in that regard. Their sales and support teams were integrated into Intel and now you can't get any support from them whatsoever even if you spend $MM/yr. You need to funnel even basic questions and bug reports through a distributor contact to have any chance. I forget the specifics but they made tooling even more restrictive/expensive. The only new products out of it are a few Xeons with built-in FPGA ($$$$$), good for HFT guys I guess.
- QuixoticQuibit 6y agoCan you expand on why Intel’s move was smart (what did the Altera acquisition do for them) and why FPGAs have a bright future in the datacenter? From what little I’ve seen in this space, FPGAs have not made large inroads in the ML space or datacenters in general. This seems partly due to their inefficient nature compared to ASICS and moreover their software. Unless AMD is planning something really ambitious (e.g., true software-based hardware reconfiguration that doesn’t require HDL knowledge) and are confident they’ve figured it out, I’m not sure what they hope to achieve here.
- ansible 6y ago> From what little I’ve seen in this space, FPGAs have not made large inroads in the ML space or datacenters in general. I don't know that they have actually made large inroads into those spaces, but Xilinx is indeed pushing hard for that. For years now.
- brandmeyer 6y ago> true software-based hardware reconfiguration that doesn’t require HDL knowledge This has been a holy grail for at least two decades. Its very much like asking for a programming language that can be used by non-programmers.
- znpy 6y agoHopefully we'll get better open source tools, a better Vivado maybe ?
- galangalalgol 6y agoThat is my hope as well. Also the new versal line compares itself to a gpu, maybe we see a gpu/fpga combo?
- amelius 6y agoThey could have better open source tools simply by opening up all their specs. The same holds for any other vendor.
- NotCamelCase 6y agoOpen source or not, I think this'll (hope so!) lead to a much better FPGA development flow within Xilinx ecosystem in not-so-distant future.
- thecureforzits 6y agoWhy? What market is there in open source any more?
- rcxdude 6y agoJust better tools would be nice (and open-sourcing would bring some hope for that). FPGA tooling is atrocious, especially if you're used to software tooling. And the difference in tooling can sell chips all on its own.
- detaro 6y agoOne that has tools that don't make your users hate you. Seriously, the open-source FPGA toolchains are breath of fresh air to use, despite being small projects with few contributors (although due to that and no vendor support they are severly limited in supported targets and special features).
- duskwuff 6y ago
- baybal2 6y agoShould we call it a "tit-for-tat" acquisition?
- saagarjha 6y agoWhat’s next, Nvidia acquiring Lattice Semiconductor?
- baybal2 6y agoMay well be, even if they have no current use for them, one would really want to have a patent bulletproof vest in case the king of the hill battle intensifies.
- jl2718 6y agoThis is a very good point. IP protection may be the only thing keeping margins alive in this sector when the DUV gains run out.
- ancharm 6y agoThat or Achronix
- snvzz 6y agoI hope not. I actually like Lattice's lineup.
- saagarjha 6y agoHmm, this was rumored but I guess now it is actually happening. Nice bump on the share price there I guess, it’s currently trading at around $115 and it seems to be converted to $143 in AMD. I assume this is to help AMD push more into the server and ML compute spaces?
- phendrenad2 6y ago<many years ago> when Intel acquired Altera, and announced Xeon CPUs with on-chip FPGAs, I was optimistic that eventually they would add FPGAs to more low-end desktop CPUs (or at least Xeons in the sub-$1000 zone). But it never materialized. I'm slightly optimistic this time around too, but I suspect that the fact that Intel didn't do it hints at some fundamental difficulty.
- baybal2 6y agoOn-package, not on-chip
- saddlerustle 6y agoThey never ended up shipping the high end ones either.
- QuixoticQuibit 6y agoIm skeptical as well. The primary reason IMO is the software. How do you easily reconfigure your FPGA to efficiently run whatever computationally intensive and/or specialized algorithm you have?
- SSLy 6y agoMy armchair amateur brain immediately thought about something CUDA-like.
- numpad0 6y agoFPGA code takes hours to compile, yet product/model specific
- FPGAhacker 6y agoYou would use precompiled modules or compositions of these modules (pipeline or parallel). This can be a relatively fast operation. Seconds or less depending on complexity.
- 6y ago
- petra 6y agoWhat happened recently in AMD's market ? AWS based ARM processor looks to be widely deployed in the cloud.Nvidia, the leader in GPU compute in buying ARM.Intel, which has suffered deeply because of their 10nm fab problems are going to work with TSMC.And AMD's P/E ratio is at 159, higher than Amazon's! So Maybe AMD is looking to convert some inflated stock with a predictable business. And it's better to invest in a predictable business that may have possible synergies with yours. Otherwise it looks bad to the stock market. And Xilinx is probably the biggest company AMD can buy.
- kbumsik 6y agoYup, in 2020 it's getting the new era of semiconductor industry.
- Traster 6y agoAMD's P/E is high but that's based on the fact that AMD earnings are $390m (2020Q3) vs. $6Bn (2020Q3) for Intel - essentially people are pricing in AMD being the obvious alternative to Intel in the data centre and the potential profit from that is enormous compared to AMD's current market share.
- paulmd 6y agoor another way of putting that is investors are jumping the gun and pricing in years and years of expected marketshare growth that haven't happened yet. it's a relatively safe bet now that intel has more or less conceded leadership through 2023 but it's not zero risk. The market generally doesn't have an appreciation of that, P/E was still nuts even before the release of Zen2 when AMD's success was far less clear (Zen1/Zen+ were far less appealing products and scaled far less well into server class). It's a lot of amateurs (see: r/AMD_Stock on reddit) buying it because they like the company rather than trading on the fundamentals. Right now the stock market is just nuts in general though, there's so much money from the Fed's injections sloshing around and looking for any productive asset, and tech companies look like a good bet when everyone is stuck at home, building home offices, consuming tech hardware and electronic media. Housing is getting even more weird as well.
- 6y ago
- gvb 6y agoEverybody seems to view this as AMD mimicing Intel when it acquired Altera. (That acquisition has not born visible fruit.) My contrarian speculation is that this is a move driven by Xilinx vs. Nvidia given Nvidia’s purchase of Arm and Xilinx’ push into AI/ML. Xilinx is threatened by Nvidia’s move given their dependence on Arm processors in their SOC chips and their ongoing fight in the AI/ML (including autonomous vehicles) product space. My speculation is that this gives Xilinx an alternative high performance AMD64 (and possibly lower performance & lower power x86) "hard cores" to displace the Arm cores. Interesting times.
- gmueckl 6y agoWhy not license other softcores, e.g. from SiFive?
- gvb 6y agoThe performance of soft cores are significantly lower than hard cores. Xilinx already has a RISC soft core in their MicroBlaze architecture so they don't have a pressing need for a low power, reasonable performance RISC soft core. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroBlaze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroBlaze AMD has high performance CPUs being fabbed by TSMC (same foundry as Xilinx), so (theoretically) AMD CPUs can be grafted onto the Xilinx FPGA as a hard core. With AMD and the MicroBlaze, they have the high performance and low power processor spectrum covered with no need for 3rd party licensing costs.
- brandmeyer 6y agoFPGAs are to ASICs as interpreted languages are to compiled languages. I don't mean that literally, but I do mean it in the performance sense. At the same process node, an FPGA is over 50x the power and 1/20th the speed of a dedicated ASIC and it isn't getting any better.
- dragontamer 6y agoThat's a decent analogy. Note however that Xilinx has a dsp slice (UltraScale) which is a prefabbed adder / multiplier. This would be PyTorch in the analogy. FPGA LUTs cannot compete against ASICs, so modern FPGAs have thousands of dedicated multipliers to compete. The LUTs compete against software, while the dedicated 'Ultrascale DSP48 Slices' competes against GPUs or Tensors. -------- It's not easy, and it's not cheap. But those UltraScale DSP48 units are competitive vs GPUs. It's still my opinion that GPUs win in most cases, due to being more software based and easier to understand. It is also cheaper to make a GPU. But I can see the argument for Xilinx FPGAs if the problem is just right...
- FPGAhacker 6y agoCould be interesting. I prefer an independent Xilinx, but maybe competition with intel will stimulate the whole reconfigurable computing revolution that fizzled out.
- mmrezaie 6y agoI understand that they need a big push in DPU market, but I do not understand why companies as big as AMD do not invest and build what they need in house? If anyone can, it is AMD that can gather the talent. Everyone was talking about future data centers, and as far as I can tell I have been hearing about heterogeneous IO since 2009 (and that's me, and I was hearing it while working on Xen). To asnwer my question maybe the market is so volatile that they cannot do strategic planning like that?
- dspillett 6y ago> why companies as big as AMD do not invest and build what they need in house? Often it is an expertise thing, especially when buying smaller companies. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring With larger purchases like this one that can still be part of the equation, though there is also the matter of lead times needed to bring a significant team and related infrastructure needed for the project(s) online and up to speed. Also if a company is seen as ripe for buying, it can sometimes be done in part to stop a competitor getting a chance at the above advantages. I suspect a mix of all three is at play here.
- Guthur 6y agoHiring talent is hard and risky, especially in an area that you are actually expert. The more risk option is the just acquire a company that's done it all for you. Of course that does leave the merging part. But on paper it looks fast and easy.
- mmrezaie 6y agoDicipline of the company is more important than the talent. Oracle has a lot of talent, but they lack the discipline of generating anything novel. They buy the idea. Anyhow semi-conductor industry is different. Apple or Amazon played it in my opinion better although in vastly different markets.
- CodeArtisan 6y agoxilinx is the holder of more than 4000 patents.
- fizixer 6y agoAMD are clowns. Clowns are acquiring Xilinx? to turn Xilinx into a clown show?
- Hikikomori 6y agoHow are they clowns exactly?
- fizixer 6y agoUhhh ... by playing the kind of competitor that nVidia couldn't have imagined in their wildest wet dreams?
- varispeed 6y agoI hope they will not drop their CPLD chips. They were made obsolete at least once but Xilinx fortunately decided to extend the support for a couple of more years. CPLD are very useful for repairing vintage gear where logic components fail and are no longer available (for example custom programmed PALs), so you can describe the logic in Verilog and often solder it in place of multiple chips. If they drop it then the only way to do it would be to use full blown FPGA which is a bit wasteful.
- thrtythreeforty 6y agoI would be very interested in reading a blog post about this. Is there one that I can read or you'd be willing to write?
- varispeed 6y agoHave look at materials linked there http://dangerousprototypes.com/blog/2011/04/17/replacing-discrete-7400-logic-devices-with-cplds/ http://dangerousprototypes.com/blog/2011/04/17/replacing-dis...
- xiphias2 6y agoThis comment is off topic, but while I'm listening to the earnings call, I don't hear about specifically official PyTorch and Tensorflow support for AMD graphic cards. All the questions and answers are generic with buzzwords like AI, doubling down on our software support, but it doesn't give me confidence to change my NVIDIA GPU to an AMD one for the foreseeable future. I remember the time when Elon Musk said to an analyst that he's asking boring questions to fill in his spreadsheet, and I'm feeling the same thing while listening to the earnings call.
- ckastner 6y agoMy impression is that the accelerated computing side of AMD is receiving far, far too little attention. For example, their flagship GPU is still not officially supported by ROCm (AMD's answer to CUDA) [1]. Imagine the 2080 Ti not being supported by CUDA. I've become a huge AMD fan, both because of their hardware, and because of their commitment to open source. But while the battles they have one against Intel on the x86 side are impressive, it seems that CUDA is leaving them far behind. [1] https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/887 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/887
- Tuna-Fish 6y agoIt likely will never have support. AMD chose to bifurcate their GPU designs into compute (CDNA) and games (RDNA) lines, with different architectures. RDNA sheds all the fancy features needed to support modern compute, thus gets more efficient in games that do not use it, but also cannot support the modern compute APIs.
- xiphias2 6y agoNVIDIA is adding more features, like super-scaling to games, and machine learning models are improving faster than Moore's law. I expect those fancy features, like tensor cores to be a must for 4K gaming in the future. What's funny is that the same strategy (leaving out specialized instructions from consumer level hardware) that worked extremely well for CPUs won't work for GPUs in my opinion. If you look at ray tracing hardware (I have it on my RTX 2070 Max-Q card in my laptop), it sucks right now, but it's improving very fast as machine learning algorithms improve. I just found this: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-big_navi-rdna2-all-we-know https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-big_navi-rdna2-all-we-... One thing that I forgot is that AMD can just focus on inferencing hardware (INT16 operations), and leave out tensor cores...so actually you are right, I'll just stay with NVIDIA GPUs.
- fxgx99 6y agoInteresting fact, apparently the CEO of AMD and NVIDIA are cousins, Thinking about that for a second
- fxgx99 6y agoApparently the CEO of NVIDIA are cousins, think about that for a second
- gpderetta 6y agoInterestingly, Xilinx owns Solarflare. I wonder if that was part of the appeal.
- tutanchamun 6y agoYeah, I thought so too since Nvidia owns Mellanox and Intel having their own NICs, OmniPath etc.
- throwmemoney 6y agoIt is really funny when you find out that Intel uses Xilinx FPGAs for prototyping as they cannot get what they acquired (Altera) working in house to make things work.
- rustybolt 6y agoSource?
- hongseleco 6y agoI second this, I want details!
- GloriousKoji 6y agoI don't work for Intel but I do work for a semiconductor company. While Xilinx FPGAs aren't directly used for prototyping, there are a large number of third party boxes purchased to accelerate hardware simulations and they're chocked full of FPGAs.
- yvdriess 6y agoThat's the more likely explanation. Altera vs Xilinx isn't just the hardware, it's an entirely different toolchain. It would be insane of Intel to demand third parties to move all their technology over to Altera's.
- kyting 6y agoIntel uses Synopsys Zebu ASIC emulator, which essentially has Xilinx Ultrascale inside.
- cjwinans79 6y agoIf true, ouch! Intel seems to be getting kicked every which way these days. Too complacent when they once ruled the roost.
- tails4e 6y ago
- nfriedly 6y agoI'd like to see consumer-level CPU + GPU + FPGA products that emulators could take advantage of. I'm thinking of floating point math for PS2 right now, but I'm sure there are other examples where an FPGA could be beneficial.
- teleforce 6y agoFor those in ASIC and chip design industry, the two of the largest chip companies namely Intel and AMD buying two of the largest FPGA companies is inevitable, it's just a matter of "when" rather than "if". I think the more interesting news is what they are going to do pro-actively with these mergers rather than just sitting on it. I really hope their respective CEOs will take a page from the open source Linux/Android and GCC/LLVM revolutions. I'd say the chip makers companies are the ones that benefit most (largest beneficiary) from the these open source movement not the end users. To understand this situation we need to understand the economic rules of complementary goods or commodity [1]. In the case of chip makers if the price of designing/researching/maintaining OS like Linux/Android and the compilers infrastructure is minimized (i.e. close to zero) they can basically sell the hardware of their processors at a premium price with handsome profits. If on another hand, the OSes and the compilers are expensive, their profit will be inversely proportional to the complementary elements' (e.g. OSes & compilers) prices. Unfortunately as of now, the design tools or CAD software for hardware design and programming, and also parallel processing design tools are prohibitively expensive, disjointed and cumbersome (hence expensive manpower), and if you're in the industry you know that it's not an exaggeration. Having said that, I think it's the best for Intel/AMD and the chip design industry to fund and promote robust free and open source software development tools for their ASIC design including CPU/GPU/TPU/FPGA combo design. IMHO, ETH Zurich's LLHD [2] and Chris Lattner's LLVM effort on MLIR [3] are moving in the right direction for pushing the envelope and consolidation of these tools (i.e. one design tool to rule them all). If any Intel or AMD guys are reading this you guys need to knock your CEO/CTO's doors and convinced them to make these complementary commodity (design and programming tools) as good and as cheap as possible or better free. [1]https://www.jstor.org/stable/2352194?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2352194?seq=1 [2]https://iis.ee.ethz.ch/research/research-groups/Digital%20Circuits%20and%20Systems/current-projects/epi.html https://iis.ee.ethz.ch/research/research-groups/Digital%20Ci... [3]https://llvm.org/devmtg/2019-04/slides/Keynote-ShpeismanLattner-MLIR.pdf https://llvm.org/devmtg/2019-04/slides/Keynote-ShpeismanLatt...
- MayeulC 6y agoI don't recall where I read this, but hardware vendors have been trying to comoditize software, and vice-versa. It's really obvious when you think about it. If you sell nails, you want to make sure that everyone has or can afford a hammer, and hammer manufacturers like to make sure that there is a large supply of compatible nails. As much as I would like to see it, I am not sure the equation is that simple in the case of CAD software. Sure, that would make it easier to use FPGAs, but it would also make it easier to create competing products, as a stretch. I still think it's worth it, and wish bitcode format was documented, at the very least.
- johnwalkr 6y agoXilinx Zynq and Ultrascale series are multiple Ghz ARM cores plus FPGA. They're incredibly useful for small volume niche use cases and to give an example from my industry, becoming popular in space applications. The reason is hardware qualification/verification is extremely expensive but a change to FPGA fabric is not. My point is Xilinx have already proven ARM CPU+FPGA on one die and I think AMD CPU+FPGA is very likely to be a success. Between this, ARM adoption, Apple Silicon and similar offerings (which kind of skipped ARM+FPGA for ARM+ASIC), RISC-V, it's like 1992 again with exciting architectures. Only this time software abstraction is much better so there is not a huge pressure to converge on only 1-2 architectures.
- panpanna 6y agoARM + ASIC? Isn't that simply a SoC? Edit: technically, the arm part is also ASIC, but you get what I mean
- beezle 6y agoSo who are left in the fpga space? Lattice?
- ohazi 6y agoYou can still buy Altera FPGAs, and you'll still be able to buy Xilinx FPGAs -- they're not going to just throw away a three billion dollar business. Lattice is probably the next biggest. There's also Microchip (< Microsemi < Actel), Quicklogic, and Gowin. Nobody really came close to competing with Altera / Xilinx at the high end, though.
- duskwuff 6y agoNot a lot. Actel was acquired by MicroSemi in 2010, and MicroSemi was in turn acquired by Microchip in 2018. There's a couple of upstarts in China like Gowin and Anlogic, but they haven't made much of an impact in the larger market yet.
- tookiwooki 6y agotestttttttt weee
- imtringued 6y agoI would rather see Processing in Memory (PIM) become mainstream than FPGAs. FPGAs are basically an assembly line that you can change overnight. Excellent at one task and they minimize end to end latency but if it's actually about performance you are entirely dependent on the DSP slices. With PIM your CPU resources grow with the size of your memory. All you have to do is partition your data and then just write regular C code with the only difference being that it is executed by a processor inside your RAM. Having more cores is basically the same thing as having more DSP slices. Since those cores are directly embedded inside memory they have high data locality which is basically the only other benefit FPGAs have over CPUs (assuming same number of DSP and cores). Obviously it's easier to program than either GPUs or FPGAs.
- nickff 6y agoYou're comparing two completely different paradigms. FPGAs are not an assembly line at all; the assembly line analogy applies much more closely to a processor's pipeline. FPGAs are just a massive set of very simple logic units which can be interconnected in many different ways. FPGAs are best used in situations where you want to perform a series of simple operations on a massive incoming dataset, in parallel, especially in real-time situations. Performing domain transforms on data coming in from sensor arrays is one very good application for FPGAs.
- qwertox 6y agoAre FPGAs rewritable at will with almost no degradation (for example a rewrite every minute over many days), or do they suffer the same degradation problems as EEPROMs (like the ones in Arduinos)?
- calacatta 6y agoFPGAs use SRAM to store their program, while CPLDs (complex programmable logic devices) use flash. Some clever marketeers here & there will stretch this distinction but it's an established convention. The internal architecture between FPGAs and CPLDs is typically different, based on cost of memory vs. logic and typical use cases. FPGAs tend to be used for higher-capacity computations but require more life support; CPLDs tend to serve smaller, true glue logic applications, where the low config overhead (just apply power) and quicker & simpler power-up is a strong pull. So CPLDs will have some kind of NVRAM wear-out concern, and this is almost always specified as a number of maximum erase & program cycles.
- mkhalil 6y agoWell considering how Ryzen Master runs, I don't have much hope for Xilinx's software to get better by this acquisition.
- SemiTom 6y agoThe apparent driver here isn’t about AMD wanting to get into the FPGA business. The real motivation appears to be a combination of platforms and programmable chiplets. There are two problems that programmable chips address https://semiengineering.com/amd-wants-an-fpga-company-too/ https://semiengineering.com/amd-wants-an-fpga-company-too/
- galaxyLogic 6y agoAre FPGAs any good seems to be the discussion. Well they must be good for something because: "... Across the different market segments where it operates, Xilinx brought in revenues of $767 million last quarter." https://siliconangle.com/2020/10/27/official-amd-snap-xilinx-35b/ https://siliconangle.com/2020/10/27/official-amd-snap-xilinx...
- 6d65 6y agoProbably makes sense as a business decision. In my opinion, I would also like for AMD to invest in ML tooling while they have the cash. I hope one day Pytorch, XLA, Glow would have native AMDGPU support, and I will be able to buy a couple Radeon 6000 series cards, undervolt them and make a good ML box. I think AMD gpus on TSMC 7nm, then maybe even 5nm, will have the best performance or watt. Even though they might be 10% or 20% slower than the alternative. For me performance per watt and dollar is more important. Anyway, it's sad that they couldn't make a 5 to 10 people (I might be too optimistic) engineering team that would make their product relevant in this market.