Intel Launches Atom CPU With Integrated FPGA 188
An anonymous reader writes "Intel is quite clearly serious about offering competition to ARM in the embedded market, and has just announced a new Atom processor series that offers a unique selling point: an integral FPGA processor. Billed as 'the first configurable Intel Atom-based processor,' the Atom E600C series combines an Intel Atom 'Tunnel Creek' chip with an Altera Field Programmable Gate Array — offering, the company claims, significantly more flexibility for ODMs and OEMs."
Awesome (Score:5, Informative)
Assuming it's priced relatively reasonably, that is fucking awesome.
Achronix FPGA's fabbed by Intel (Score:5, Informative)
Re:double rainbows (Score:5, Informative)
If you would program one to be a decryption device you could have very fast decryption, but you can't let it do something else when there is nothing to decrypt (multitask).
All in all the result will be a major increase for applications that are reprogrammed to be in the FPGA (and are small enough for the FPGA) but nothing will change for the other applications.
There are many other chances and limitations, as it is a completely different device, but these are the most important (as far as I know) in this case.
Actual information (Score:5, Informative)
http://edc.intel.com/Link.aspx?id=3961 [intel.com]
350 user I/O pins. I think that could control a few Christmas lights. Or make a nifty message-passing bus for a parallel computer.
Wonder if anyone will make inexpensive boards with breakout IO?
Only certain Virtex-2Pro/4/5s have PowerPC cores (Score:4, Informative)
Many Virtex-II Pro, Virtex-4, and Virtex-5 don't have PowerPC cores. No Virtex-6 or later device does.
In particular... (Score:5, Informative)
Altera used to have FPGAs with an embedded ARM core + support "stripe" (Excalibur, early 2000s) -- e.g. Altera Excalibur EPXA10.
Of course Xilinx has announced a family of 7 series FPGAs with ARM Cortex-A9MPCore cores. http://www.xilinx.com/technology/roadmap/processing-platform.htm [xilinx.com]
Both Xilinx and Altera also have in-house soft-processor cores and infrastructure, and ecosystems of third-party soft processor cores.
Re:double rainbows (Score:4, Informative)
One interesting aspect of the Altera soft CPU (NIOS), is that you can add custom HW directly into the execution unit, basically making your own HW instructions. Then you can generate an assembly instruction for it and use it right from your code. This lets you do nifty things like build a custom piece of HW to implement some arcane computation that is specific to your particular use of the HW and have it built right into the CPU. Wonder if there is this sort of setup here.. that would be pretty nice.
www.altera.com/literature/ug/ug_nios2_custom_instruction.pdf
Re:FPGA users already don't care (Score:5, Informative)
FPGAs aren't all that cheap either. They're about rapid development, and are cheaper than an ASIC for small to medium lots. Large scale ASICs win out on cost per unit being really low.
Reading the Intel E6x5C Platform Brief... (Score:5, Informative)
Before you all speculate widely, try reviewing the actual product brief. http://download.intel.com/embedded/processors/prodbrief/324535.pdf [intel.com] . In which you will see this is an MCM with an Atom E6xx SoC die and an Altera FPGA die, interconnected by 1-2 PCIe x1 links. It has an amazing 1466 ball grid array package.
It's not clear to me what this level of packaging and integration achieves compared to mounting a (not integrated) E6xx BGA and a separate Altera or Xilinx FPGA BGA onto the main PCB, interconnected by PCIe x1 or perhaps even x4. Then you would get a broader choice of FPGAs -- and perhaps a simpler PCB escape for the two packages compared to one 1466 ball beast.
The advantages of this MCM as stated in the brief include:
* reduced board footprint
* lower component count
* simplified inventory control / manufacturing
* single-vendor support
True, but forgive me if I'm not over the moon. The dream of integrated FPGA fabric into a heterogeneous SoC (same die) includes a very low latency and possibly cache coherent interconect between the processor(s) and the FPGA. But here the FPGA is on the other side of a narrow PCIe link. It can't share the Atom SoC's memory hierarchy / DRAM channels very effectively. It is probably a very long latency round trip from x86 software control / registers and L1$ data, to some registers or function units in the FPGA, and back to the x86. So I think of this as more of a super-flexible Atom SoC platform than a dream reconfigurable computing platform.
It's a nice step but I look forward to so much more.
http://www.fpgacpu.org/usenet/fpgas_as_pc_coprocessors.html [fpgacpu.org] (1996): "... So as long as FPGAs are attached on relatively glacially slow I/O buses ..."
-- including 32-bit 33 MHz PCI -- it seems unlikely they will be of much use in general purpose PC processor acceleration.
Re:Put an ARM in the FPGA (Score:5, Informative)
The advantage of the ARM business model is that you don't have to. Anybody can get a license from ARM to put a core in an ASIC. This means that is very easy to build an integrated system on a chip around a CPU and any kind of peripherals you want.
This is Intel's attempt to capture some of that market. But because they don't want to license their core, their trying to tie it to an FPGA. I have doubts whether this will be attractive. FPGAs are slow, use more power, and are more expensive compared to ASICs. For high-volume products they can't compete on price, and for high-performance products they can't compete on speed.
Re:double rainbows (Score:3, Informative)
Some vendors, such as Juniper, have transitioned at least some of their product lines from ASICs to FPGAs. A problem with ASICs is that you can't patch them for security issues. This is bad if, say, you sell firewall products.
Re:FPGA users already don't care (Score:3, Informative)
There are very cheap FPGAs too! Actel igloo nano are even under $1. These are often used as glue logic or nano-controllers like to connect a USB port to an ADC and DAC. In many cases, low cost ($1-20) FPGAs are use instead of microcontrollers and often FPGAs are even being programmed with microprocessor cores like the Nios(altera) or Microblaze (xilinx) or even soft ARM cores. You can run Linux on them!
Hardly a unique product, apart from x86 (Score:2, Informative)
There are loads of FPGAs on the market with integrated PowerPC cores. There are probably FPGAs on the market with integrated ARM cores (ah yes, a post already links to one such creation). This is a dual-die package with a 60k gate FPGA. It's a nice option on the market, but it's hardly unique. The cost will be a major issue as well, although so far the prices look reasonable. But you can't put much into 60,000 gates (although maybe they're counted different from Xilinx or Spartan gates), certainly not a Minimig AGA core.
So enjoy your 600MHz Atom + FPGA. Or 1GHz. Or 1.3GHz. WIth enough FPGA to implement a C64. Yeah, I know that in industry it will be used for different purposes, but will that industry care about x86 compatibility ... or continue using the existing PowerPC and ARM options?
Re:double rainbows (Score:3, Informative)
No, Transmeta Chips did on-the-fly binary translation.
And it turned out to not be a selling point.
Re:Only certain Virtex-2Pro/4/5s have PowerPC core (Score:3, Informative)
Xilinx Extensible Processing Platform [xilinx.com] parts are supposedly manufactured, and planned for sale in early 2011. I've been hearing about their progress for over a year from a friend who's a top Xilinx engineer.