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Thank goodness. I've been expecting this ever since Intel bought Altera, they just stuck with it a couple years longer than I figured. They focused solely on t
by mips_r4300i 3y ago
Thank goodness. I've been expecting this ever since Intel bought Altera, they just stuck with it a couple years longer than I figured.
They focused solely on the high end, but it turns out nobody really wants FPGA fabric on a CPU. You can already do acceleration over a PCI express link, and that's what you more often do with embedded applications where the CPU is acting more like a dispatch controller than doing the real work.
Intel also have completely ignored the low end of the market. The only true lowend part they have is the Cyclone 10LP, which is literally the exact same part as the cyclone 3/4 from 2008. Just slightly die shrunk. No hard IP support like ddr3 controllers, no MIPI, nothing that people are getting from the competition now.
Intel did realize this, which is why the new AgileX family includes some "low-mid range" parts, but they will be still much more expensive. Low-end to Intel means "under $1k unit cost" which ignores a huge part of the market.
They have better tools, documentation, and support than Gowin, who is a recent Chinese FPGA upstart using stolen Lattice IP and hires. But they will lose to Gowin by default in the commodity space unless they do something.
- trsohmers 3y agoThey have announced the new Agilex 3 line, which should include some CPLD price point parts and be a real rebirth for ~$100/unit modern devices.
- bfrog 3y agoLets see I guess... I'm not holding my breath, but it'd be great to not use Vivado's slow ass Java IDE one day. Quartus is light years faster seemingly.
- Tuna-Fish 3y agoThey did not ignore the low end by choice. The entire story of Altera inside Intel can be summarized as: Intel fabs make amazing promises about process performance and availability. Altera builds their product stack on that. In the end, the fabs fail to deliver either performance, or sufficient amount of manufacturing capability. Now Altera has to pick which products they want to ship. They obviously can the low end. Even the high end that ships is horribly late, because of manufacturing issues. There would have been massive demand for the combined Intel+Altera products. Many large customers built their future based on the marketing promises Intel made, and when they couldn't deliver, those customers had to redevelop everything on something else. As an example, look up Nokia Reefshark.
- eqvinox 3y agoDo you have some citable sources for this? It sounds like it might very well be true, but, well, …
- re-thc 3y agoIt was widely reported, e.g. https://www.semiaccurate.com/2019/09/23/altera-releases-stratix-fpgas-years-late/ https://www.semiaccurate.com/2019/09/23/altera-releases-stra...
- yarg 3y agoAny use at NVidia for that tech? If the biggest problem is process, Altera should be shopping around for a company with an in on manufacturing at TSMC. (I doubt AMD's an option, since they already subsumed Xilinx.)
- oscillonoscope 3y agoI've had Intel sales people tell me that the entire low end of some their marketed FPGA/ASIC products have never and likely will never be sold
- rthomas6 3y ago> nobody really wants FPGA fabric on a CPU. Not true... Xilinx sells a lot of their Zynq, MPSoC, and RFSoC chips. Though I guess those are more CPU on an FPGA.
- tonyarkles 3y agoIntel doesn’t really make low end CPUs like that though. The Zynq is an awesome little chip and there really isn’t anything on the market to compare it to as far as I know. From my perspective sitting on the sidelines of this industry, Intel went all-in assuming companies would want FPGAs in the data centre the same way they want GPUs in the data centre and that bet didn’t pan out.
- glitchc 3y agoSounds like intel is mismanaged.
- ethbr1 3y agoIt certainly was. It remains to be seen if it is. If they'd been made a performant (as in, non-x86) low-end CPU, then they wouldn't have lost mobile and be competing with ARM now. Intel of the past few decades learned the wrong lesson from their history. You can climb the value chain to riches, but once you're at the top you still need to seed the earth for the next generation of profits. And that means cheap entry points and volume.
- sitkack 3y agoThe low end always eats the high end, always. Intel sold StrongARM to Marvell and that is some of the Arm IP they are fighting against in hyperscaler space. https://www.theregister.com/2006/06/27/intel_sells_xscale/ https://www.theregister.com/2006/06/27/intel_sells_xscale/ https://www.networkworld.com/article/3574013/marvell-exits-the-general-purpose-arm-server-business.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3574013/marvell-exits-t...
- 3y ago
- andrepd 3y agoWhat is even a "low-end" application of FPGAs, if you don't mind my asking?
- seren 3y agoSome embedded stuff where the FPGA is used to implement some logic on I/Os, some processing that needs to be fast or implement some i2c, CAN, SPI controller trough IP core. Basically a more flexible way than having different chips on the board.
- hobo_mark 3y ago> They have better tools, documentation, and support than Gowin, who is a recent Chinese FPGA upstart using stolen Lattice IP and hires. Naive of me to ask, but how are they allowed to sell anywhere outside of China?
- sitkack 3y ago> stolen Lattice IP and hires If this is true, then the bitstream for Gowin and Lattice parts would be similar and both are being actively reverse engineered to be supported by OSS tools. It would be nice to see more evidence of this.
- padf 3y agoI don't think there is any evidence of this. Open Source tools fully support Lattice (low end) FPGAs, and support for Gowin FPGAs is not quite as mature. It seems that many of the initial FPGA patents have expired, and that's why many small FPGA vendors are appearing. Please correct me if I am wrong.
- sitkack 3y agoI agree. IP theft is a bold claim, that is why I was asking for more citations. Not only are the patent expired, but there are three projects that generate FPGA fabrics programmatically. FPGAs are extremely easy to construct as they are a repeating lattice.