4 ms·
For a while in the 2000s Cisco was one of the biggest users of FPGAs. If you consider how complicated digital designs have been for many decades, and the costs
by kev009 1y ago
For a while in the 2000s Cisco was one of the biggest users of FPGAs. If you consider how complicated digital designs have been for many decades, and the costs of associated failures, FPGAs can certainly be cost neutral at scale, especially accounting for risk and reputational damage, into production lines.
Also there is a large gamut and pretty much always has been for decades of programmable logic.. some useful parts are not much more than a mid range microcontroller. The top end is for DoD, system emulation, novel frontier/capture regimes (like "AI", autonomous vehicles).. few people ever work on those compared to the cheaper parts.
- duskwuff 1y agoFPGAs are still quite common in niche hardware like oscilloscopes or cell towers, where the manufacturer needs some sophisticated hardware capabilities but isn't manufacturing enough units to make the NRE for an ASIC worthwhile.
- stephen_g 1y agoAlso time to market - I have a friend who worked for Alcatel Lucent and they would use FPGAs while Nokia would use ASICs, they saw it as a big advantage since if there was a problem in part of the ASIC, or if you needed new features that were outside the original scope, the time and cost to respin was massive over fixing problems or implementing new standards in the FPGA bitstream! Eventually Nokia ended up buying Alcatel Lucent and not too long after he left, not sure what their current strategy is.
- cubefox 1y agoWhy not use CPUs instead of FPGAs?
- razakel 1y agoBecause whilst a CPU can emulate what you want, it can't do it efficiently.
- tverbeure 1y agoWhy do people use GPUs instead of CPUs? For some workloads, an FPGA is orders of magnitude faster than a CPU.
- vardump 1y agoFPGAs are way superior running a lot of parallel pipelined logic. They can have SERDES that can communicate at gigabits per second. You can build logic that reacts in nanoseconds to external I/O with zero jitter.
- stephen_g 1y agoThey're not just moving packets around, they're producing streams of data that pass through dozens of stages and end up being spit out into a DAC to produce radio signals (and vise-versa, signals into an ADC and then through many demodulation stages). All the modulation, demodulation, framing, scrambling, forward error correction coding/decoding, etc. has to all happen continuously at the same time. There are some open source software defined radios that can do that for one or two stations on a CPU at low data rates, but it's basically impossible with current CPUs for anything like the number of stations (phones) that are handled in one FPGA with decent data rates, latency etc. You'd probably need a server rack's worth of servers and hundreds of times the power consumption to do what's happening in the one chip.