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."
Re:Don't know if this is a first (Score:1, Interesting)
All of the Xilinx Virtex parts have an integrated PPC hardware core. This announcement is somewhat different, though, in that it seems they have integrated an FPGA fabric on a traditional CPU die.
Being able to implement application-specific memory controllers would be handy, to say the least.
Re:double rainbows (Score:2, Interesting)
Essentially this means that there is a chunk of the processor which will be *COMPLETELY* configurable. FPGA stands for "field programmable gate array" which just implies that you can re-program the way those gates are connected *after* the chip has been manufactured.
Without understanding basic electrical engineering logic it's hard to describe all the neato things you can do with this, but essentially FPGAs can do all sorts of neat things and they can do them in parallel. If you've ever heard of something being "cheap in hardware but expensive in software" that's exactly what an FPGA can solve.
Something like this (assuming the FPGA had enough gates) might allow you to implement the HDCP decoder in "software", and decode the bitstream in realtime. This would be neat!
Re:Actual information (Score:3, Interesting)
It's been done, it's being done. (Score:2, Interesting)
Done: Altera Excalibur EPXA10
In progress: http://www.xilinx.com/technology/roadmap/processing-platform.htm [xilinx.com]
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
It is not the pricing which is interesting here, it is will there be anticompetitive marketing restrictions.
Atom was intentionally crippled through pairing with crippled 5+ year old video and a specific resolution restriction for systems with it. After NVidia broke this restriction it was redesigned to exclude it.
i815e was intentionally crippled to 512 RAM through a marketing restriction so that RDRAM and 840 and 820 sell.
Turning off SMP anywhere they could turn it off for 10 years since PPro so that the "server varieties" of the same chip (often from the same tray) sell.
And so on.
Intel has a long history of shooting itself in the foot on non-cannibalisation grounds. I suspect it shot itself here as well. This can make a phenomennal HPC platform due to its motherboard "real estate" and cooling requirements, however that will eat into Intel Xeon + QPI enabled FPGA sales. So I guess it will be crippled through marketing to disallow that.
FFS, it does not take a genius to understand the basic idea that "If there is money in it, someone else will cannibalise it for you, so you might as well cannibalise yourself and expand the market".
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
Dude, everyone does that. AMD/ATI does it, Nvidia does it, IBM does it, Motorola used to do it, and if Apple ever designed/manufactured anything themselves, they would do it, as well. It's called marketing. Those $1000 "Extreme" CPUs that Intel sells only cost about $100 to manufacture, if that. Probably only $25 or $50. How do you think Intel recoups its R&D costs? It prices the high end chips as high as the market will allow, then sells the mid-range chips for a more reasonable price.
Did you forget that AMD was selling Athlon XP and Athlon MP chips at wildly different prices, even though you could enable MP on the Athlon XP by drawing on them with a pencil? What about disabling MP every one of the later Athlon chips? Even some Opteron chips have MP disabled! That's seriously wrong, in my opinion. As far as I know, no Xeon has ever had MP disabled. Say what you will about Intel, but if you buy a Xeon, you know what you're getting.
What do you want Intel to do, anyways? Sell all their CPUs at manufacturing cost, with no feature differentiation at all? So that everyone can buy Xeon MP chips for $50 each? Yeah. OK. Let's see how long that lasts. I'd say Intel would be bankrupt in less than a year.
Seriously, dude, if you want cheap SMP motherboards and CPUs, go shop on ebay for used stuff from failed dotcoms. That's what I used to do. I even scored some high-end server-grade hardware, like DEC Alpha CPUs, SCSI RAID enclosures, SCSI drives, and smart UPSes. There's no need to rant about Intel's "anti-competitive" tactics, of which exactly zero legitimate examples exist in your post. Intel has done some pretty shitty things in the past, but this isn't one of them. Save your rant for something that matters.
FPGA-based robot controllers (Score:4, Interesting)
Articles (found freely on Google) like "Evolving FPGA-based robot controllers using an evolutionary algorithm." by Renato A. Krohling, Yuchao Zhou, and Andy M. Tyrrell is a dream!!!
Genetic algorithms and FPGA is way cool!
Re:Awesome (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you forget that AMD was selling Athlon XP and Athlon MP chips at wildly different prices, even though you could enable MP on the Athlon XP by drawing on them with a pencil?
Done that. It ups the heat output of the chip from "lots" to "ow my fingerprints"...
I suspect that the chips actually sold as MP were from the higher-end binnings so that they produced less heat (the same bins that the highest performance and the laptop versions of the chips also come from). The "midrange" chips often can't be clocked to the same speed as the top-end chips, because they are physically inferior.
Incidentally the Athlon XP-M chips used less power and put out less heat than the normal ones, and oddly were left with MP enabled. Unfortunately unless you have an MP board capable of manually altering the CPU multiplier (mine didn't) or you cut a bunch of traces on the chip, they'll only run at 4x the fsb (600MHz in my case). Seeing how things freak out when you have one 2GHz cpu and one 600MHz cpu in SMP was interesting though.