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It was a silly acquisition in the first place, and their justification clearly came from a coke-addled fever dream. Intel soon discovered the obvious, which is
by bigfatkitten 2y ago
It was a silly acquisition in the first place, and their justification clearly came from a coke-addled fever dream.
Intel soon discovered the obvious, which is that customers with applications well-suited to FPGAs already use FPGAs.
- georgeburdell 2y agoIf AMD did the same thing years later, was it really that foolish?
- stonogo 2y agoYes, because AMD is fabless, and Xilinx didn't suddenly have to figure out how to work around Intel's production problems.
- mschuster91 2y ago> Intel soon discovered the obvious, which is that customers with applications well-suited to FPGAs already use FPGAs. Yes, but pairing an FPGA somewhat tightly integrated with an actually powerful x86 CPU would have made an interesting alternative to the usual FPGA+some low end ARM combo that's common these days.
- bigfatkitten 2y agoApplications that benefit from the Zynq-style combination (e.g. radio systems) generally take that approach because they have SWaP concerns that preclude the use of big x86 CPUs in the first place.
- michaelt 2y agoSure, if they wanted to intel could have done what nvidia did with CUDA: Put the tech into everything, even their lowest end consumer devices, and sink hundreds of millions into tooling and developer education given away free of charge. And maybe it would have lead somewhere. Perhaps. But they didn't.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoIt was the thought at the time that they'd do this. It's amazing that they don't seem to have actually tried ? Any sense as to why or what went wrong?
- michaelt 2y agoI wasn't there, but I've always imagined the conversation went something like this: Intel: Welcome, Altera. We'd like you to integrate your FPGA fabric onto our CPUs. Altera: Sure thing, boss! Loads of our FPGAs get plugged into PCIe slots, or have hard or soft CPU cores, so we know what we're doing. Intel: Great! Oh, by the way, we'll need the ability to run multiple FPGA 'programs' independently, at the same time. Altera: Ummmm Intel: The programs might belong to different users, they'll need an impenetrable security barrier between them. It needs full OS integration, so multi-user systems can let different users FPGA at the same time. Windows and Linux, naturally. And virtual machine support too, otherwise how will cloud vendors be able to use it? Altera: Uh Intel: We'll need run-time scaling, so large chips get fully utilised, but smaller chips still work. And it'll need to be dynamic, so a user can go from using the whole chip for one program to sharing it between two. Intel: And of course indefinite backwards compatibility, that's the x86 promise. Don't do anything you can't support for at least 20 years. Intel: Your toolchain must support protecting licensed IP blocks, but also be 100% acceptable to the open source community. Intel: Also your current toolchain kinda sucks. It needs to be much easier to use. And stop charging for it. Intel: You'll need a college outreach program. And a Coursera course. Of course students might not have our hardware, so we'll need a cloud offering of some sort, so they can actually do the exercises in the course. Altera: I guess to start with we Intel: Are you profitable yet? Why aren't you contributing to our bottom line?
- 2y ago
- komadori 2y agoDo you think AMD's decision to buy Xilinx was any better or not?
- Alupis 2y agoPerhaps we can say it was less of a distraction for AMD, given AMD is not having the basic execution issue that Intel is currently suffering.
- rcxdude 2y agoAnd less disastrous for Xilinx, given they could basically just keep going as they were before, instead of being significantly diverted onto a sinking ship of a process.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoThere was some hope at the time that FPGAs could be used in a lot more applications in the data center. It is likely still feasible. Remember Hennessy published: https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~wl/teachlocal/arch/papers/cacm19golden-age.pdf https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~wl/teachlocal/arch/papers/cacm19go... And maybe this is/was a pipe dream - maybe there aren't enough people with the skills to have a "golden age of architecture". But MSFT was deploying FPGAs in the data center and there were certainly hopes and dreams this would become a big thing.
- bigfatkitten 2y agoThat was certainly the dream, but unfortunately for them it didn't turn out to be a new market.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoI don't know enough about hardware to know why - why didn't this story play out as hoped?
- smj-edison 2y agoI'm just a casual observer, but I'm pretty sure one hard thing about FPGAs is preventing abuse. A customer could easily set up a ring oscillator that burns out all the LUTs. Another thing is FPGAs are about 10x slower than dedicated logic, so CPUs/GPUs beat them for a lot of applications. Plus, there's not a lot of logic designers in the first place. Software skills don't transfer over very well. For example, a multiplier is about the size of 8kb of RAM, so lookups and complex flow are way more expensive than just multiplying a value again (kinda like GPUs, except if you only had an L1 cache without main memory).
- smj-edison 2y agoNot sure why I'm being downvoted, would those who downvoted me explain why? I try to be accurate so if I missed any important details I'd like to know :)
- matt3210 2y agoIt made their stock pop for a while which was all that mattered to Brian Krzanich who took the bonus and left the mess in the hands of Bob Swan who did the same things and left the mess ... (recursion her).
- nativeit 2y ago> Intel soon discovered the obvious, which is that customers with applications well-suited to FPGAs already use FPGAs. So selling FPGA's was a bad move? Or was the purchase price just wildly out-of-line with the--checking...$9.8B annual market that's expected to rise to $23.3B by 2030?
- bcrl 2y agoIntel can't even act as a functional foundry for internal customers.
- dbuder 2y agoIt was a forced acquisition, iirc they made promises to Altera to get them to use their foundry, failed to keep those promises and could either get sued and embarrassed or just buy Altera outright for about what they were worth before the deal.