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.
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.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Dude, WTF? If Apple were any more vertically-integrated they'd own their own African tantalum mine.
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And the chip design companies they bought and the chip design people they still employ are just there to improve their marketing too, right? The anti-Apple conspiracy arguments are getting weirder by the week. Yes, they base their chips on established designs and don't create every chip from whole cloth. But you don't get products into form factors like the MacBook Air, iPad, and iPod Touch by just throwing together off-the-shelf parts.
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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
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You know, the first thing I thought about when reading that Intel was going to include FPGA on the Atom was that some manufacturer(s) would figure out how to use it to give consumers less for their money, or preventing them from doing something with their hardware.
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s/YOUR MESSAGE/every company in the world tries to charge what the market allows them to, it's called the elasticity of demand such that price is determined by competition not the price of production.
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Yeah, maybe. I'm sure some people will attempt it. But you're forgetting something crucial: warranties.
If you drive your car off a cliff, you've voided the warranty. The same basic principle applies here.
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Well, at least she didn't try to make you listen to her.
double rainbows (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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Though you can use them for things other than hardware a
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Interesting. I was thinking the same as GP: what the heck is that!
Can this reprogramming be done by the OS, upon need? And how slow is slow?
Could be nice for e.g. video decoding.
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Video decoding may be better on a dedicated chip. A good GPU should be fine (oh wait, it's Intel ...)
I guess FPGA could be used for nifty device drivers. You don't want to change the touchscreen interface very often (as an example), but if you (shudder) encounter a bug then the FPGA can be modified.
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That's why my question: how slow is slow to reprogram? Could this be a replacement for various dedicated chips - taking up a task when needed? Like when you want to play a video, it becomes video decoder, or maybe it can be used for other tasks that are fairly intensive, and last long.
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The only sure answer is unfortunately "it depends". Just because they are programmable in the "field" doesn't mean you can necessarily do it from software. Some FPGAs require a service tech to hook some other system up to the motherboard to change anything. Some require pulling the chip and putting it in a portable device. Some can have different programs swapped in from ROM at different times. Some can have custom programs loaded from RAM by an application. I'm not sure which this is, but since it's the At
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Given that some of Xilinx's parts can reconfigure from flash memory in only 1-2 seconds, this much smaller part should be able to configure in under half a second if the reconfiguration architecture is done right.
So you could reconfigure it as part of an application startup sequence. Not sure how you'd handle device contention though (an attempt to run two apps that both want to use the FPGA - context switching would be a real bitch).
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No, Transmeta Chips did on-the-fly binary translation.
And it turned out to not be a selling point.
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If there was a mass market, you'd make an ASIC. This lets embedded developers create special circuitry for whatever embedded need they have, which is useful but I don't see it as a mass market product for regular consumers.
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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.
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s/some vendors/most vendors/
Telecom and datacomm equipment have long used FPGAs at key points in their systems for one or more of the following reasons:
* off-the-shelf silicon sometimes costs to much
* off-the-shelf silicon is missing something that is important to you (maybe an interface type, or a key feature)
* off-the-shelf silicon doesn't have the density
* ASIC's cost a lot to develop, and prices have been going up (while each year, FPGA prices go down). If you don't have pretty high volume, each year i
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I could see usage of this in portable consumer devices (phones, tablets, whatever is the next thing), offering the possibility for app-dependent 'ASIC' on otherwise low-computing-power devices - say, when the user is watching a video, put the stream decoding stuff on the FPGA, if there is music in the background, put the mp3/ogg/whatever decoding there so that the main processor is free for other apps, heck, if flash or html5 is too slow then probably some compute-intensive part of it can also be pushed to
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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
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Wouldn't a GPU with GPGPU be better at that anyway?
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With an FPGA, you can generate on-the-fly a customized hardware accelerator for your problem domain. This could be a processor with specialized instruction for your problem domain, a vector processor, or even a hardware raytra
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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
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This is not a soft core CPU. You get a package with 2 dies inside: a regular Intel Atom CPU core, and a separate FPGA.
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man, i remember working on a nios II project back in 2005 for my internship, that was an awesome experience, configuring my own cpu, bus-clock, multipliers, memory interfaces and all that stuff
Compile times sucked though, especially since the best hardware us interns got was a 2.4 GHz pentium 4.. i would click compile and go for a walk around the building, get tea/coffee, returning to find my 45 minute compile couldnt achieve the clock speeds i wanted it to run at...
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Probably not for anything you'd be interested in. Unless of course, you're interested in a slow CPU with slow (but custom) logic. If you want fast custom logic, or ridiculously low-power, you go with an ASIC (assuming you have either high volume, or can tolerate a high per-unit price). If you don't have a rather complex, repetitive calculation to do, you go with a regular CPU. If you do have a big calculation, you might consider a faster CPU or GPU, or at least something with a faster connection between the
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There *is* a programming model, there's just no *good* programming model. I'm very familiar with Verilog and VHDL, and use them in my job. That said, they're not languages that an average programmer can pick up and expect to get a good result - you have to learn how various constructs get converted to hardware, and how you are constrained by the hardware you are working with.
Similarly, I feel like OpenCL and the many parallel programming models suffer similar limitations (I've used Pthreads, OpenMP, MPI, Ha
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Atoms aren't totally useless. I actually have a dual core atom that I am using as a server, with a VM running. I also remote desktop into the machine and use it on a daily basis at work. Since I'm pretty much the only user of the machine, it works perfectly and consumes under 30W. I used to leave my desktop on 24 hours a day and it was sucking up 300W all day long. That's a huge power savings for me at $0.12a kWh.
If you're wondering why I keep this thing running all the time its because I run an SVN,
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Yeah, but SSDs have more CPU overhead than HDs. If you are running something that doesn't do a lot of disk I/O it may be that you would be better off with an HD.
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Actually, SSDs have the same overhead as a hard disk. Even those of a year ago - it's all SATA anyhow. It's just that you're completing I/O operations so much faster on an SSD that the CPU is busier because it can get more stuff done -
Good example (Score:3, Insightful)
It would let viruses create some custom FPGA code that would be able to crack any encrypted files you had in mere seconds, instead of hours.
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Atom would almost certainly win handily [coremark.org]
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This could have interesting implications for game AI.
Depending on how slow the FPGAs are to reprogramit'd be interesting to use these to simulate a neural network, or something similar. Live, adaptive AI which is independant of the CPU :)
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Could the FPGA also implement codecs? that would be a more flexible alternative to hardware based decoding/encoding. Or is it a job for a programmable dsp instead, I don't really know.
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This isn't for users, it's for ODMs and OEMs. You'll probably need physical access and a programming board to program the FPGA, no realtime in software programming.
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The FPGA's I've worked with lose their programming when the power goes out, and are reflashed by software on every boot.
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Then what is their value proposition ? "1 chip is slightly cheaper" ? That wouldn't convince many people.
If people use this, it will be for the live reprogramming feature.
The main reason to glue an FPGA to a hard-core processor is that your application-specific logic can be right next to the processor, rather than in a separate device. The FPGA/Atom device, when installed in an OEM's product, will very likely NOT be user-programmable, as it's married to the underlying hardware (PCB and other external devices).
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.
Achronix FPGA's fabbed by Intel (Score:5, Informative)
more jobs for me (Score:5, Funny)
yay!
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I thought you don't need a programmer for FPGAs ;)
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i am an ee monster!
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FPGA programming (or rather desiging for an FPGA, implementing algorithms) is not so much about EE as it is about CS.
Wrong. It has little to do with CS - and in fact, if you approach it that way, you'll make code that the synthesis tools can't handle efficiently. You'll end up with many levels of logic and won't meet your timing requirements. FPGA "programming" is about describing digital circuits in an HDL.
Marc
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The AC doesn't know what he's talking about, but digital circuit design has gradually incorporated more and more CS concepts and methodology. HDLs are becoming more high-level, for example, so that an engineer can describe what needs to happen and when, leaving the details on how up to the synthesizer.
There's a reason that universities are offering Computer Engineering degrees, bringing together Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. The AC is right: Ohm's Law doesn't really apply (that's not to say
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?
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Then I suppose if you want to handle raw, uncompressed 1080p60 I guess you'll need something with more bandwidth than this particular Atom.
Here's a thought: I wonder if you could route that other external PCIe back into the FPGA for more bandwidth?
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Yes! Finally enough I/O pins to make my velocity-sensitive pipe organ idea viable....
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Actually I'm excited about the possibility of inserting a chip like this into my Hammond M-100A organ, then running Linux apps on it that control all its keys and switches. If I could embed just the tone generator electromechanics and chip in a cabinet, with effects loops and MIDI, I could have all the various hardhack Hammond mods available, and new ones, in a small cabinet. I could even have room for several Hammonds at once, making chorus/phaser/vibrato and really complex combos. Keyed either from softwa
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Well, my insane idea involves ripping out the actual keyboard from a pipe organ, replacing it with a MIDI keyboard of the same size, and using it to drive a computer that translates the MIDI signals into commands for a series of controllers (one per rank). Because each keypress would send key velocity information, the harder you play, the louder the sound would be (like a piano). This could, of course, be enabled or disabled at will, since it's all done in software.
Each controller would consist of a contr
Very cool and very kludgy (Score:2)
The right way to do this license the Altera IP and integrate it closely with the CPU. Then the CPU could use it in normal operation, for floating point for example. You have various programs and every time you try to access one that's not in the FPGA an interrupt is generated.
Almost like in the good old days of WCS.
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.
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I was immediately thinking if that would mean someone could make a cheaper NetFPGA/LibreRouter (line rate forwarding open source router platform using FPGA instead of ASICs which the normal routers from Cisco, Juniper, etc. use for hardware-routing/switching).
It is mostly used for academic purposes, but if the FPGA does not have direct access to RAM and can not do direct I/O it's probably not useful.
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Xilinx EPP [xilinx.com] puts an ARM Cortex A-9 in the die with a large Xilinx FPGA. Is that the dream of integrated FPGA fabric come true?
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And it's only 60K logic elements, making it clear that this device is not intended for number crunching.
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i dont know, FPGAs are wonderfull for DSP/codec functions. This could give intel a way to really speed up HD playback on their platform without having to finally build a decent graphics chip (like nvidia has done with ion, or amd with their IGPs), but those applications benefit from high data throughput.
Unless this FPGA is somewhat undersized or has a decent chunk of ram directly attached to its own pins, it will be severely choked by the pci-e 1x interface
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Using the FPGA as a replacement for a decent GPU would be crazier than Larrabee. Which isn't to say they won't try it ;)
It's Complicated (Score:2)
I love programming and wiring up some microcontrollers as much as the next geek, but at what point does a chip become too complex for realistic home use?
I don't need hundreds of GPIO pins, and I don't even think I can solder detailed enough or design home-made PCB with enough detail to accommodate a processor with this many pins and features.
I am pretty happy to see FPGAs making it into commercial projects - they're just so useful.
"You want your processor to use this specific logic pipeline? There's a chip
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This part will be sold in PCs with large parallel connectors for interfacing multiple or complex devices to the FPGA pins, along with the rest of the HW that supports a smart embedded device. You won't be soldering directly to the part.
But it's not really designed for "home use", except for embedded home automation developed by serious engineers. Which could be a DIY, but mostly won't be.
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 Min
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I've got an industrial control project that's been designed so far around an embedded Atom PC and a custom PCB for sensor/actuators. We might be able to port the custom PCB to this FPGA, leaving only voltage transformers/transistors/relays outboard. Which could save us a lot of money in production, and even more in maintenance/upgrades. There are existing PPC and ARM devices, but our existing SW is for x86. Which is why an Atom/FPGA part could be a great savings for us. And of course ours is a very typical
SSL offloading (Score:2)
If it's fast enough you could use it as an SSL front end to non-SSL web servers.
Eclipse Tools? (Score:2)
Can I run Linux and Eclipse on one of these new CPUs locally, and use a good Eclipse module to port Linux kernel functions (like IO logic) from iterated procedures to the FPGA, then test them? Which Eclipse modules would support that development?
FFT engine (Score:2)
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I seem to recall Xilinx offering a FPGA with an embedded PowerPC core 8-ish years ago. Or maybe it was four cores, I heard it from a co-worker.
Summary does say 'the first configurable Intel Atom-based processor'.
But yeah Xilinx have had PowerPC on FPGAs for a while and they are still current products. Altera has offerings with an embedded CPU as well
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.
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Additionally, on both Altera and Xilinx, you can implement a Cortex-M0 core right in the FPGA logic.
Actel supports Cortex-M1, too.
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.
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The largest I have seen has two PowerPC 440 cores. That would be the Virtex-5 FX130T and FX200T (Only different in the number of logic gates available).
None of the current V6s do, but I keep hearing about Xilinx going to ARM. It is in one of their roadmap documents but no real info on exactly where in the roadmap it is.
Unlike Intel's solution, the Xilinx units have everything on a single silicon die.
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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.
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The largest I have seen has two PowerPC 440 cores. That would be the Virtex-5 FX130T and FX200T (Only different in the number of logic gates available).
None of the current V6s do, but I keep hearing about Xilinx going to ARM. It is in one of their roadmap documents but no real info on exactly where in the roadmap it is.
Unlike Intel's solution, the Xilinx units have everything on a single silicon die.
And my God, the tools SUCK.
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This announcement is somewhat different, though, in that it seems they have integrated an FPGA fabric on a traditional CPU die.
No they haven't - it's two chips in one package.
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Two problems holding back CPU+FPGA products were power consumption (and related heat dissipation) and price. Those limits also are finally holding back CPU products (or rather the products they're embedded in) overall, which is why there's a market for Atom or ARM chips at all. Meanwhile, overall market demand for embedded PCs that contain complex, high performance logic is growing very quickly, especially in automotive and energy industries. So the stars seem to be crossing each other right this time, afte
FPGA users already don't care (Score:2)
If you care about power, you make an ASIC. An FPGA is all about being cheap and getting to market. FPGAs burn power and don't even clock fast.
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.
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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!
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And the design process is worse: If you design for Atom+FPGA and then want to move to an ASIC you have a bunch of work to do. If you start with a separate FPGA, just drop an ASIC in place.
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It might very well burn a lot less than the same thing done in software.
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THis might be the weak point. Suppliers cannot change to a ASIC in a later phase, unless intel licenses the atom cpu. (right....). The biggest advantage of atom is de x86 development tools and applications (windows). The Quick to Market is a big win there. However to optimize power/price in a later phase is not possible.
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Not all that correct. Typically FPGAs are used when either production quantities are to low to justify the expense of creating ASICs, OR if you want to reprogram your self on the fly.
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: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.
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I highly doubt Intel is interested in competing in the low-volume, low-performance markets.
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They aren't. That's why they have this CPU+FPGA product that they'll sell in large volume to a large number of companies that do low volume work. That's what the FPGA is for: letting lots of low-volume products be built from one high-volume product.
Xilinx / ARM Cortex A-9 (Score:2)
Xilinx this year introduced a whole new architecture embedding an ARM Cortex A-9 in a large FPGA [xilinx.com], designed to run primarily as the CPU, including FPGA functions as the developer specifies through software.
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!