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Intel announces new FPGA families
- chclau 4y agoFollowing Altera acquisition by Intel, and Xilinx acquisition by AMD, perspectives for many FPGA designers were gloom. There was a general feeling that the two biggies would go to a road where the FPGA is only and add-on or coprocessor for CPU workhorses, for applications like Data centers and ML acceleration. Well, according to these news from Intel, that's not the case. Intle announces new mid-level FPGAs and even new FPGA to compete with Xilinx RFSoCs
- varispeed 4y agoMy particular worry was that AMD would cancel Xilinx's CPLD chips, but so far it does not look like it. They are very very useful if you want to replace old 74xxx circuits and greatly simplify development.
- FullyFunctional 4y agoI share(d) that concern. Mitigating this is that a lot of (low to mid range) alternatives seems to have gotten steam: Lattice Semi, Efinix, Gowin, and more that I forget at the moment. I'm rooting strongly for the underdogs to become viable alternatives to the current duopoly. It would of course have been preferable for any of them to directly support the open stack (yosys, nextpnr, and the various bitstream generators); Lattice's ECP5 is nice, but not very fast.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago[flagged]
- dtx1 4y agoCan someone estimate the power of these new FPGAs? Is a MisterFPGA with n64/PS2 emulation in range?
- NovemberWhiskey 4y agoWhen you talk about "mid-range" in Intel's current product line up, that usually means the Arria 10 line. Those are typically around $1,000 for just the FPGA package itself, so I don't think we're realistically talking about something that's going to make meaningful impact on the hobbyist emulation market.
- foft 4y agoI'll try to answer this, though my direct experience is only with Cyclone and Max 10. The Mister uses the Cyclone V 5CSEBA6U23I7 built on TSMC 28nm. It has 110000 logic elements and also a hard ARM. These are on Intel 7, so there a significant process improvement. The smallest Agilex D has the same number of logic elements(1) and the largest has 6x as many (2). Note that Agilex tends to be much more expensive than Cyclone. Realistic maximum clock rates on the Cyclone V are 50-200MHz, depending on the length of the combinational logic chains. For the Agilex I think that it is more like peak 600MHz. So I would guess say 25% faster and say peak 750MHz? As to fitting all the logic for n64/PS2, I don't know! 1) Comparing these directly is not quite accurate. 2) https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/programmable/agilex-d-series-product-table.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/progra...
- nfin 4y agodid you really mean 25% faster or 4x faster? If you really meant 25% you probably were not reffering to the clock speed/MHz, what were referring to?
- foft 4y agoI did mean 25% faster, though it was a guesstimate. That was comparing Agilex to Agilex D, not Cyclone V to Agilex D. FPGA logic in simple terms consists of LUTs (look up tables, used to implement gates) and registers. The LUTs can be chained several times until they connect to a register. Registers are clocked at a frequency. Now the max frequency is calculated using the maximum time from a register output, through a bunch of LUTs to reach another register. So it depends how long the chain is. Its more complex than that in reality since there is also the time for the clock to propagate and to route the signals around. Fortunately the software takes care of that. I don't really know how maximum frequency is specified in the specs, but I guess it'd be something like an ideal register->single LUT->register without much routing.
- foft 4y agoIf anyone is Intel in reading this, please can you provide a lead-time for the low end FPGA (e.g. Cyclone V and Max 10) to Mouser and Digikey? I understand there is an ongoing major chip shortage but it has been over 2 years and historically these were available next day. I'm sure that I'm not the only one waiting for years with finished designs and no information. I asked Digikey and they told me that Intel do not provide them with good communications, such that they cannot even populate this, never mind to provide a lead time per product. https://www.digikey.ch/en/resources/reports/lead-time-trends https://www.digikey.ch/en/resources/reports/lead-time-trends
- varispeed 4y agoI wonder if the war has anything to do with this actually. These chips and some larger STM32 like F7 and H7 are dual use and can be used in missiles and drones. I couldn't buy the car manufacturers' excuse. I think MICs around the world have been stockpiling these chips.
- DoingIsLearning 4y agoI was working for a customer (medical) last 12 months with a Zynq design. I remember at the time the distributor specifically saying they were being instructed to give priority to US companies on their stock as it arrived (I assume defense). They had to have a meeting with higher uppers at the distributor to scramble about 200 pieces industrial grade from them (that was basically a year's worth of production for that product, low volume production). So I have no doubt that whatever mil contractors need they will get it.
- krapht 4y agoSituation is dire even for contractors unless your product is already in production and has somebody on the government side advocating for you.
- p1necone 4y agoI know the Cyclone V specifically is used in the MiSTer project (https://www.retrorgb.com/mister.html https://www.retrorgb.com/mister.html), I'm not sure how big a part of overall demand that is though.
- sylware 4y agoWith a simple, public, open and stable in time hardware programing interface? I mean not a scam.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- anonymousDan 4y agoAnyone able to give a rough estimate of how much one of the FPGAs with R-Tile would cost per device for a small order (1-5)? 1k, 10k, 100k? Are they likely to be available any time soon?
- amirhirsch 4y agoThe Intel Direct RF FPGAs are pretty spectacular. They report 64GSPS and 25GHz instantaneous bandwidth directly into FPGA fabric (no JESD) which greatly exceeds any other competitors’ IC offerings on the market. I wonder what they will cost: if their high-end 8ch device is <$16K then they will annihilate the competition (I’m able to get $2K per channel for large multichannel direct RF systems 1Ghz instantaneous all the way up to x-band)
- brooksbp 4y agoI can only imagine how long it will take the fitter to pnr these insanely wide busses. Maybe a 13th gen CPU overclocked to 8GHz would be handy.
- buildbot 4y agoDays at least. P&R is NP hard I believe. Force directed placement or simulated annealing is slow and random :/
- jjoonathan 4y agoXilinx keeps advertising the bejeesus out of their AI p&r, but I haven't touched these tools in years -- how much do the claims translate to reality?
- rowanG077 4y agoConsidering my experience with Xilinx, the more they advertise it the harder it sucks.
- UncleOxidant 4y agoXilinx design tools are some of the buggiest pieces of software known to humankind. Altera(Intel) not far behind.
- reportingsjr 4y ago
- snvzz 4y agoThat's some news because Intel hadn't in a while. But IMHO this is is far more interesting: https://hardwarebee.com/gowin-semiconductor-new-22nm-high-performance-fpga-family-arora-v/ https://hardwarebee.com/gowin-semiconductor-new-22nm-high-pe... This is a real contender from China. Not just some new cheap chip, but actually competitive with Intel/Lattice/Xilinx offerings.
- AnonMO 4y agoCompetitive in what sense? in which market outside of china? Cyclone V a decade old platform offers similar capability and is a tested platform.
- snvzz 4y ago... at 22nm? Apples to oranges.
- AnonMO 4y agoCyclone V is 28nm so it should be outclassed by a new product offering in 2022 thats manufactured at a better node right? i'm not saying its a bad design, but that product is not a competitive offering. this new family from intel is on intel 7 node which is at scale intel can eat node prices to stay competitive. intel will probably price this competitively with its cyclone v offering if that happens intel will eat the market share of xilinx and lattice unless they announce something new.
- xani_ 4y agoYou can buy their parts on mouser and they have "small" fpgas too there are even few in stock https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/GOWIN-Semiconductor/GW1N-LV1QN48C6-I5?qs=sGAEpiMZZMsWE4XtJSx%252BsXdrDOXH2yDAR80%252B8imuDOGJbIbCiR2xIQ%3D%3D https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/GOWIN-Semiconductor/GW1N...
- snvzz 4y agoI'll avoid these chips merely because they don't have support in the Open Source FPGA stack (yosys/nextpnr), whereas other chips do.
- buildbot 4y agoFPGAs would be so much more useful if AMD(Xilinx)/Intel(Altera) just gave up trying to build there own tools and instead supported F4FPGA: https://f4pga.org https://f4pga.org
- snvzz 4y agoNote that some vendors actually do. QuickLogic mentioned there was contributed by the company making these FPGAs.
- muttled 4y agoI see a lot of use of FPGAs in things like cutting-edge machinery, warfare, and stock trading. Are there any cool hobbyist uses of these things? Always game to learn a new tech.
- tgv 4y agoThere's always sound or image generation, or programming a game like Pong. That's always looked cool to me. There are some "easy" entry points, e.g. https://maker.pro/arduino/tutorial/getting-started-with-fpgas-using-the-arduino-mkr-vidor-4000 https://maker.pro/arduino/tutorial/getting-started-with-fpga..., but I've never gone as far as actually try them. With a bit of luck, someone will reply with better options. Edit: or look at this list: https://hackaday.io/search?term=fpga https://hackaday.io/search?term=fpga
- jstrom 4y agoThe Cypress PSoC might be of interest. It's a combination FPGA and microcontroller, the low-end demo boards with USB programming get as low as ~$10. Though most of what you can do with the FPGA would be covered by built-in timer/capture modules or the PICO PIO modules on other chips (though IIRC, some of the boards have analog support in the FPGA if you wanted to do real-time audio processing). I have not found a particular hobbyist use for them, only know it from my father teaching some computer engineering courses and picking since he could use the same board for digital logic and microcontroller programming.
- adrian_b 4y agoFor someone making hobby electronics experiments, an FPGA can be used to make a cheap (but with modest performances) logic analyzer and digital oscilloscope (and test signal generator, if desired). Many years ago, that would have been the only solution to avoid paying thousands of dollars for a professional instrument. However, nowadays there exist a number of commercial solutions for such cheap instruments, which are made exactly like this, i.e. with an FPGA surrounded by appropriate I/O circuits and connectors, some USB or Ethernet interface for the PC and some capture software. These have the advantage that are ready to use out of the box, but making yourself such an instrument can be instructive.
- FullyFunctional 4y agoThe announcement is surprisingly lacking in architectural updates; it looks like the same Agilex on a new process. Has Intel killed innovation? ADD: last time I witnessed something actually new and interesting: https://www.efinixinc.com/technology.html https://www.efinixinc.com/technology.html
- SilverBirch 4y agoFPGA innovation is very incremental. The hyperflex architecture is basically the single biggest innovation in FPGA fabric, and it basically didn’t pay off. Altera also smashed up against the wall of Intel 10nm. So all in all, some reduced precision for AI and some EMIB enabled stuff isn’t too bad.
- buildbot 4y agoNeeds better tools to take advantage of it, right now using hyperflex (registers on long routing lines to automatically pipeline your designs) is quite difficult from what I have heard.
- SilverBirch 4y agoYeah, this was one of those situations where the hardware guys create a super cool thing that requires amazingly complex software to take advantage, and it turns out the software guys aren't going to solve all the problems you created.
- FullyFunctional 4y agoIndeed, that was the downfall of Tabula (sniff)
- TheDesolate0 4y ago
- whatever1 4y agoIs it still very difficult for generic programmers to program an FPGA for their particular application?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- honkycat 4y agoI want to write an open source FPGA synthesizer so badly.