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Exactly the same experience here. At encouragement of intel contacts, we went into Intel (ex-Altera) FPGA last year, with the oneAPI push and programming the FP

Exactly the same experience here. At encouragement of intel contacts, we went into Intel (ex-Altera) FPGA last year, with the oneAPI push and programming the FPGA cards with SYCL being free. The cards are now discontinued (but still sold), the drivers don't work on any distro more recent than 2018 - even though the oneAPI toolkit itself requires a more recent OS; the only non-discontinued replacements require software ecosystem license purchase, it's impossible to download the older (working) versions of the toolkit, and the contacts stopped talking to us once we actually bought the cards. Add to that the constant show-stopping compiler bugs and toolkit issues that made it feel like we were the only people actively using it, I think we've learned to run far, far away now.

Foobar8568 4y ago
I have been burnt by the sockit board. I move away from wanting to learn fpga after all the bushit. All fgpa vendors are similar as far as I'm concerned.
- krasin 4y ago
  Open source FPGA toolchains begin to appear, mostly on the low-end for now. And because all FPGA vendors are doing such a terrible job for tooling, Yosys and friends are likely the future.
  - FullyFunctional 4y ago
    Very true; Lattice Semi’s ECP5 is a fairly decent FPGA with very mature support from Yosys/nextpnr/trellis. Xilinx’ Artix-7/Kintex-7 are much more powerful FPGAs and the support for those is getting to be pretty good (DDR3 support is steadily maturing) It would be nice to see a vendor actually officially supporting these efforts. Maybe one day. (Not to mention various open source FPGAs - actual chips - being developped)
- rowanG077 4y ago
  Treat them as purely hardware vendors and go open source tooling. The tooling is infinitely superior from a ux point of view. There are still quite a bit of missing features but it is getting there.
- misnome 4y ago
  We've heard positive opinions of the Xilinx boards and tooling. At least, not having everything about the HLS tooling either changed or syntax deprecated every three months.
  - bcrl 4y ago
    But Xilinx has the absolute worst SERDES interface. Microsemi's Polarfire was way easier to get 10G ethernet up and running on (hours vs weeks).
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Well that's because Intel has nothing but beancounters milking it for bonuses and stock options running it. This is not news to anyone who watches Intel for the last couple decades. Things like this require vision, patience, investment, outreach. Things that Intel is all horrible at. They are a monopoly that wants to sit in their executive suites and ship out N+1 Moore's Law chip. Engineers? Keep them in the other buildings, and avoid them as much as possible. Intel made, what 10 billion in PROFITS last year? With a "B". And times have been semi-lean the last few years. We are talking about a monopoly that could have invested 50 billion dollars (current dollar adjusted) in the overall OSS and alternate computing platform over the last 40 years. Intel should have: - a production linux distribution highlighting their hardware features with wide support for x86. This should have happened 25 years ago. Keep Microsoft's feet to the flame. Sure, charge money for it, who cares if it doesn't sell. It keeps Microsoft actively utilizing your hardware, which Intel has always had a problem with. - Hell, at this point, they should be funding ReactOS, whatever Beos got open sourced as, one/some of the BSDs, OpenSolaris. Redox. All of it. They should be very very interested in getting as many x86 machines and x86 peripherals running anywhere they can. The writing is on the wall with the M1/M2 -- Microsoft will go ARM hardcore if Qualcomm or AMD crank out a M1/M2 competitor that is superior to x86. Intel is being stupid if they aren't covering their bases with OSS OSes. - get off your asses and get x86 on a mobile device and embedded. This is related to support of other operating systems. x86 can run in so many embedded and mobile, but because Intel didn't have the OS support flexibility, it hamstrings moving x86 and their silicon into non-Windows non-PC areas. - one thing (I guess) that Intel does well software-wise is their compilers. Why are these expensive? Why do they cost anything at all? This is related to OS support and lots of computing platforms besides PCs. If the compilers and tools were free, there was good support of OSs in lots of different computing platforms, Intel would have good diversification. - a competitive discrete graphics card. You're telling me AMD and NVidia can do this, but you can't? Seriously? It's not silicon, I highly doubt that. What it probably is ... Intel just doesn't like talking to software people, and games software? You don't need the best, but you can certainly do better than the IGP afterthoughts they do provide. - why exactly does Samsung have dominance in SSDs? Like, didn't Intel invent them? Intel might be a lost cause on the mobile phone market. You know why they missed that so bad? #1 reason: they didn't have sufficient outreach in Linux, if they did, they'd probably have been the preferred architecture of the devs #2 reason: of course related to that, they didn't have support in non-PC computing platforms. If they supported more semi-embedded (even if pure embedded wasn't a good match for x86), then they'd have been ready for the emerging devices that became the smartphone. You know what? So much of what I just explained applies to AMD too, although they probably are more willing to support non-x86/ARM/RISC-V. AMD now has a billion or two a year to do OS outreach and better compiler tools and all that. And with OS outreach, you can make sure the code generated isn't Intel-optimized, like Intel loves to do. Your OS support, Your drivers can be AMD optimized. I get AMD has been severely revenue constrained for about a decade when they sat on their asses when Intel was being dumb with Netburst, but AMD is somewhat back on top. Will AMD sit on their hands again?

Foobar8568 4y ago

I have been burnt by the sockit board. I move away from wanting to learn fpga after all the bushit. All fgpa vendors are similar as far as I'm concerned.

krasin 4y ago
Open source FPGA toolchains begin to appear, mostly on the low-end for now. And because all FPGA vendors are doing such a terrible job for tooling, Yosys and friends are likely the future.
- FullyFunctional 4y ago
  Very true; Lattice Semi’s ECP5 is a fairly decent FPGA with very mature support from Yosys/nextpnr/trellis. Xilinx’ Artix-7/Kintex-7 are much more powerful FPGAs and the support for those is getting to be pretty good (DDR3 support is steadily maturing) It would be nice to see a vendor actually officially supporting these efforts. Maybe one day. (Not to mention various open source FPGAs - actual chips - being developped)
rowanG077 4y ago
Treat them as purely hardware vendors and go open source tooling. The tooling is infinitely superior from a ux point of view. There are still quite a bit of missing features but it is getting there.
misnome 4y ago
We've heard positive opinions of the Xilinx boards and tooling. At least, not having everything about the HLS tooling either changed or syntax deprecated every three months.
- bcrl 4y ago
  But Xilinx has the absolute worst SERDES interface. Microsemi's Polarfire was way easier to get 10G ethernet up and running on (hours vs weeks).

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

Well that's because Intel has nothing but beancounters milking it for bonuses and stock options running it. This is not news to anyone who watches Intel for the last couple decades. Things like this require vision, patience, investment, outreach. Things that Intel is all horrible at. They are a monopoly that wants to sit in their executive suites and ship out N+1 Moore's Law chip. Engineers? Keep them in the other buildings, and avoid them as much as possible. Intel made, what 10 billion in PROFITS last year? With a "B". And times have been semi-lean the last few years. We are talking about a monopoly that could have invested 50 billion dollars (current dollar adjusted) in the overall OSS and alternate computing platform over the last 40 years. Intel should have: - a production linux distribution highlighting their hardware features with wide support for x86. This should have happened 25 years ago. Keep Microsoft's feet to the flame. Sure, charge money for it, who cares if it doesn't sell. It keeps Microsoft actively utilizing your hardware, which Intel has always had a problem with. - Hell, at this point, they should be funding ReactOS, whatever Beos got open sourced as, one/some of the BSDs, OpenSolaris. Redox. All of it. They should be very very interested in getting as many x86 machines and x86 peripherals running anywhere they can. The writing is on the wall with the M1/M2 -- Microsoft will go ARM hardcore if Qualcomm or AMD crank out a M1/M2 competitor that is superior to x86. Intel is being stupid if they aren't covering their bases with OSS OSes. - get off your asses and get x86 on a mobile device and embedded. This is related to support of other operating systems. x86 can run in so many embedded and mobile, but because Intel didn't have the OS support flexibility, it hamstrings moving x86 and their silicon into non-Windows non-PC areas. - one thing (I guess) that Intel does well software-wise is their compilers. Why are these expensive? Why do they cost anything at all? This is related to OS support and lots of computing platforms besides PCs. If the compilers and tools were free, there was good support of OSs in lots of different computing platforms, Intel would have good diversification. - a competitive discrete graphics card. You're telling me AMD and NVidia can do this, but you can't? Seriously? It's not silicon, I highly doubt that. What it probably is ... Intel just doesn't like talking to software people, and games software? You don't need the best, but you can certainly do better than the IGP afterthoughts they do provide. - why exactly does Samsung have dominance in SSDs? Like, didn't Intel invent them? Intel might be a lost cause on the mobile phone market. You know why they missed that so bad? #1 reason: they didn't have sufficient outreach in Linux, if they did, they'd probably have been the preferred architecture of the devs #2 reason: of course related to that, they didn't have support in non-PC computing platforms. If they supported more semi-embedded (even if pure embedded wasn't a good match for x86), then they'd have been ready for the emerging devices that became the smartphone. You know what? So much of what I just explained applies to AMD too, although they probably are more willing to support non-x86/ARM/RISC-V. AMD now has a billion or two a year to do OS outreach and better compiler tools and all that. And with OS outreach, you can make sure the code generated isn't Intel-optimized, like Intel loves to do. Your OS support, Your drivers can be AMD optimized. I get AMD has been severely revenue constrained for about a decade when they sat on their asses when Intel was being dumb with Netburst, but AMD is somewhat back on top. Will AMD sit on their hands again?