AMD to Acquire Xilinx

https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/xilinx-acquisition

by ajdlinux • 6 years ago

593 250 6 years ago

andy_ppp3• 6 years ago

Could programmable AI chips compete with Graphics Cards and TPUs or is it futile to try?

In the stock trading world, HFT on FPGA is closer to the edge than GPU / TPU solutions and they are using ML models, if you count that as AI. When the logic and the NIC are on the same hardware, it's really fast. An ASIC would be even faster, but you can't really iterate on that.

heliophobicdude• 6 years ago

Perhaps they would not make good competition. FPGAs have been known to be slower than ASICs. But then again, perhaps some other company will find a good use for rapidly changing IC design.

galangalalgol2• 6 years ago

Their new versal line puts a tpu on the die with the fpga. Great for inference, especially if you want to use the fpga to quickly extract features in the fpga and infer from feature space.

hehetrthrthrjn2• 6 years ago

This is a smart move, reflecting Intel's own, with an eye to the datacenter where the FPGA is seen as having a bright future.

voxadam• 6 years ago

I'd love to know why Intel chose to buy Altera instead of the industry leader Xilinx.

hehetrthrthrjn2• 6 years ago

It may have been Xilinx not wanting to get into bed with Intel. Xilinx may have wanted a degree of technical independence or freedom to carry out their own strategy that was not forthcoming from Intel.

andrew_gen• 6 years ago

I believe Altera was already manufacturing chips using Intel process prior to acquisition, while Xilinx is using TSMC?

ksec3• 6 years ago

Both Altera and Xilinx were on TSMC. Altera wanted an Edge over Xilinx, at the time Intel was committing ( on paper ) to their Custom Foundry. Altera switched and bet to Intel Custom Foundry. Nothing ever worked out with Intel Custom Foundry because they were not used to working with others on Foundry Process. Intel thought the problem was with Altera not being part of company and they had too much cash so they might as well buy them for better synergy. And it did, getting internal access seems to have ( on paper or slides ) speed things up with product launches and roadmap, until they hit the Intel 10nm fiasco.

pclmulqdq3• 6 years ago

Altera Stratix V FPGAs actually had more market share than Virtex 7s. They were better chips. That said, the production delays around Arria 10 and Stratix 10 and the time lag caused by the Intel acquisition totally killed their market position. The only reasons to use Intel FPGAs now are (1) 64-bit floating point support or (2) if your Intel salesman gives you a really good deal.

saagarjha6• 6 years ago

Has Intel done much with Altera? I haven’t heard much of anything come out of that partnership. (Then again, I’m not plugged in to this stuff.)

mastax• 6 years ago

I don't use FPGAs (tooling is too poor, languages are bad, up-front costs are high) but I hang out on FPGA forums and the overwhelming consensus has been bad. Chipmakers and especially high-performance chipmakers have always been focused on high-volume and/or high-margin customers, but the Intel acquisition has made Altera worse in that regard. Their sales and support teams were integrated into Intel and now you can't get any support from them whatsoever even if you spend $MM/yr. You need to funnel even basic questions and bug reports through a distributor contact to have any chance. I forget the specifics but they made tooling even more restrictive/expensive. The only new products out of it are a few Xeons with built-in FPGA ($$$$$), good for HFT guys I guess.

baybal25• 6 years ago

This is a smart move, reflecting Intel's own, with an eye to the datacenter where the FPGA is seen as having a bright future.

What in the world FPGAs have to do in a datacentre?

sadiq• 6 years ago

Microsoft have been using them in Bing and other projects for a while: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-cat...

saagarjha6• 6 years ago

Aren’t they already widely used as NICs? And I many places are beginning to offer them for ML workloads and such.

coldtea• 6 years ago

The "datacentre" mentioned is not necessarily an enterprise datacenter or a web app backend datacenter.

Think ML, networking and other such uses...

einpoklum2• 6 years ago

Because an FPGA lets you optimize your "hardware" solution to a computing problem without the hassle of fabricating a chip of your own (although the performance with an FPGA is much lower than with a custom chip).

ATsch3• 6 years ago

There's been a recent trend to increasingly move more compute capabilities into NICs. This has been going on for a while, but has gained a new dimension with cloud providers. For example, with their "Nitro" system, AWS can more or less run their Hypervisor entirely on the NIC and completely offload the network and storage virtualization from their servers. This development is likely to continue. FPGAs are going to play a significant part in that because they allow the customers to reconfigure this hardware according to their needs.

RantyDave• 6 years ago

Virtual machines are very much a thing now, and virtualisation has made it into network cards reasonably well ... but pretty well nothing else.

In our future datacentre we want to say how many cores, connected to how much ram, how much GPU resource, some NVME etc. etc. and there's going to be a whole lot of very specialised switching and tunnelling going on. This needs to be as close to the cores/cache as possible, a good order of magnitude faster than we run our present networking stuff, and probably an area where there will be a significant pace of development ie a software defined solution would be nice.

So, a software defined north bridge, in essence. And an FPGA is pretty much the only thing we have right now that could do the job.

QuixoticQuibit2• 6 years ago

Can you expand on why Intel’s move was smart (what did the Altera acquisition do for them) and why FPGAs have a bright future in the datacenter?

From what little I’ve seen in this space, FPGAs have not made large inroads in the ML space or datacenters in general. This seems partly due to their inefficient nature compared to ASICS and moreover their software.

Unless AMD is planning something really ambitious (e.g., true software-based hardware reconfiguration that doesn’t require HDL knowledge) and are confident they’ve figured it out, I’m not sure what they hope to achieve here.

ansible2• 6 years ago

From what little I’ve seen in this space, FPGAs have not made large inroads in the ML space or datacenters in general.

I don't know that they have actually made large inroads into those spaces, but Xilinx is indeed pushing hard for that. For years now.

brandmeyer7• 6 years ago

true software-based hardware reconfiguration that doesn’t require HDL knowledge

This has been a holy grail for at least two decades. Its very much like asking for a programming language that can be used by non-programmers.

znpy• 6 years ago

Hopefully we'll get better open source tools, a better Vivado maybe ?

galangalalgol2• 6 years ago

That is my hope as well. Also the new versal line compares itself to a gpu, maybe we see a gpu/fpga combo?

amelius• 6 years ago

They could have better open source tools simply by opening up all their specs.

The same holds for any other vendor.

NotCamelCase• 6 years ago

Open source or not, I think this'll (hope so!) lead to a much better FPGA development flow within Xilinx ecosystem in not-so-distant future.

thecureforzits• 6 years ago

Why? What market is there in open source any more?

rcxdude• 6 years ago

Just better tools would be nice (and open-sourcing would bring some hope for that). FPGA tooling is atrocious, especially if you're used to software tooling. And the difference in tooling can sell chips all on its own.

detaro3• 6 years ago

One that has tools that don't make your users hate you. Seriously, the open-source FPGA toolchains are breath of fresh air to use, despite being small projects with few contributors (although due to that and no vendor support they are severly limited in supported targets and special features).

mhh__• 6 years ago

FPGA development tools are generally dated, very very expensive, and one way streets for customisation.

From what I understand, open sourcing the bitstream format in its entirety will only do so much but it would certainly help. It's not just building GCC for FPGAs

baybal25• 6 years ago

Should we call it a "tit-for-tat" acquisition?

saagarjha6• 6 years ago

What’s next, Nvidia acquiring Lattice Semiconductor?

baybal25• 6 years ago

May well be, even if they have no current use for them, one would really want to have a patent bulletproof vest in case the king of the hill battle intensifies.

ancharm• 6 years ago

That or Achronix

snvzz• 6 years ago

I hope not. I actually like Lattice's lineup.

saagarjha6• 6 years ago

Hmm, this was rumored but I guess now it is actually happening. Nice bump on the share price there I guess, it’s currently trading at around $115 and it seems to be converted to $143 in AMD. I assume this is to help AMD push more into the server and ML compute spaces?

phendrenad2• 6 years ago

<many years ago> when Intel acquired Altera, and announced Xeon CPUs with on-chip FPGAs, I was optimistic that eventually they would add FPGAs to more low-end desktop CPUs (or at least Xeons in the sub-$1000 zone). But it never materialized. I'm slightly optimistic this time around too, but I suspect that the fact that Intel didn't do it hints at some fundamental difficulty.

baybal25• 6 years ago

On-package, not on-chip

saddlerustle• 6 years ago

They never ended up shipping the high end ones either.

QuixoticQuibit2• 6 years ago

Im skeptical as well. The primary reason IMO is the software. How do you easily reconfigure your FPGA to efficiently run whatever computationally intensive and/or specialized algorithm you have?

SSLy• 6 years ago

My armchair amateur brain immediately thought about something CUDA-like.

Someone2• 6 years ago

Also, for the way most modern CPUs are used: how do you task switch? If the hardware is large enough, you can deploy multiple configurations at a time, but does software support that? Is is possible to have relocatable configurations?

In theory, you could even page out code, but I guess the speed of that will be slow. Also, paging in probably would be challenging because the logical units aren’t uniform (if only because not all of them will be connected to external wires)

threatripper• 6 years ago

I would see it being used more like a GPU than a CPU.

nomercy400• 6 years ago

It is doable. I've seen it during my Computer Engineering courses 14 years ago.

Basically you analyze the code for candidates, select a candidate, upload your custom hardware design, run your operation on the hardware, and repeat.

The difficult part is that uploading your hardware to FPGA is in the order of tenths of seconds, which is ages when compared to the nano and micro seconds your CPU works. So your specific operation must be worthwhile to upload.

A bit of FPGA on your CPU makes it more flexible, for example your could set a profile such as 'crypto' or 'video' to add some specific hardware acceleration to you general purpose CPU.

Imagine your CPU being able to switch your embedded GPU into another CPU core.

wtetzner• 6 years ago

I believe there is some amount of support in OpenCL for FPGAs. If only we could get companies to property support OpenCL, we'd have a nice software interface to pretty much any kind of compute resource on a machine.

eganist• 6 years ago

I'm optimistic... not so much because of the merits of the acquisition but moreso because of AMD's history with strategic actions. ATI kept them afloat through a CPU performance drought, and divesting globalfoundries secured necessary liquidity. These two alone essentially saved AMD, so I've got faith in leadership being able to make the appropriate strategic maneuvers.

But maybe I'm being overly optimistic. (Probably because—disclosure—I'm long AMD. Been long for years.)

eqvinox4• 6 years ago

I'm hoping/expecting a chip that goes into the Epyc/SP3 socket and has the memory & PCIe & socket crossconnect as hard IP but the CPU cores replaced with programmable logic. If you have a use case for FPGAs, it's more likely you want it in a concentrated form like this... not on low-end or desktop systems :/

If I remember correctly, there was something similar back in the early HyperTransport days...

hderms• 6 years ago

Are you envisioning retaining at least a few cores? It seems like you'd probably still want an OS running on native silicon.

einpoklum2• 6 years ago

Well, you want something more low-end for developers' and hobbyists' machines, I would guess.

Nokinside• 6 years ago

Nokia designed their ReefShark 5G SoC chipset with significant FPGA component and used Intel as their supplier. Intel couldn't deliver what they promised. It was complete disaster.

They had to redesign ReefShark and cancel dividends. It was a huge setback.

noki_throway• 6 years ago

This is utter bullshit. Nokia f*cked up because they over-engineered their FPGA solution for 5G. They took largest FPGA in the market and couldn't squeeze their design in it.

It was not Nokia SoC just plain Stratix10. They moved to own SoC after that glorious project.

whereistimbo• 6 years ago

So it's Nokia that Charlie @ Semiaccurate was talking about back in 2018 saying that Intel crushed a USD 20bn market cap company

https://semiaccurate.com/2018/07/02/intel-custom-foundrys-10...

rathel• 6 years ago

Apparently after Altera acquisition they sought "synergies" in all the different divisions. My friend was an intern who was tasked with porting some of the network protocol stack to SystemVerilog. Apparently it did work and SystemVerilog was the right HDL to use because of support for structs that can map to packet headers. I'm not sure it's being used in production.

It'd be interesting to see how AMD will execute and integrate this acquisition, considering they are less of a madhouse company than Intel.

himinlomax7• 6 years ago

I wonder how much of the delay in FPGA tech adoption is due to the utterly hilarious disaster that are the toolchains. They look like huge brittle proprietary monstrosities, incompatible with modern development methodologies.

KSteffensen5• 6 years ago

And they are based on SystemVerilog and TCL, two of the worst programming languages in serious use.

Those toolchain disasters are not quite as hilarious when you have to use them daily....

rowanG0772• 6 years ago

I think pricing is also an issue. Anyone with 5 dollars in their pocket can buy an arduino clone and go to town. And many people do as can be seen by the huge hobbyist scene. You want to try FPGA development and do anything that is not blinking a LED? Good luck shelling out hundreds to thousands of dollars for the shittiest software known to this planet.

fuster• 6 years ago

I did FPGA development for a few years a little over a decade ago. I recently came back to it for a project after doing software and just wow--the tooling is still absolutely awful. Possibly worse than before. Vivado in particular seems almost designed to foil version control systems. Which files actually contain user input and are necessary to rebuild a project? Why would you want to keep source and configuration files separate from derived objects? Entire swaths of documentation and examples become immediately obsolete with each new tool version. Not to mention infuriating bugs at every turn.

dboreham2• 6 years ago

This opinion is unlikely to be popular, and it's been decades since I was a full participant in the hardware business, but...I just have never seen the use case for FPGAs beyond niche prototyping / small run applications, which by definition make no money. I suppose there are also scenarios where you want to keep your design secret from the fab and/or change it every week, but those seem very niche too (NSA, GCHQ, ..?).

moftz• 6 years ago

Easily changing the design and being the cheaper option to ASICs for small productions are the two main uses for FPGAs. You may be designing a box that can be configured to do different things so you may want to support multiple FPGA images to switch back and forth depending on the mission. You may just want to be able to easily upgrade firmware for a complex design in the future. For Space DSP applications, the FPGA is king and will probably be for a long time simply due to the ability to cram a lot of functionality into a small space (DSP, microcontroller, combinational logic circuits, and massive I/O banks all in one chip)

teleforce2• 6 years ago

I am not sure whether you are serious or trolling but I will bite ;-)

FPGA are being used in many type of applications where real-time is necessary and non-recurrent engineering (NRE) cost need to be minimized, for example here [1].

One classic example is that if you poke under the hood of any signal generator like AWGs, you will probably find an FPGA inside. As you probably aware since you in hardware business, AWGs are probably one of most common equipment in any electronic and electrical labs or companies.

[1]https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/fpgas/article/...

jleahy• 6 years ago

Not long ago there was an FPGA inside the iPhone (an ice40). Hardly niche.

ljhsiung• 6 years ago

Couple things--

1) You underestimate how critical prototyping has become, again likely since you say it's been a couple decades. Time to market has become more important, and verification has become harder as CPUs have gotten even more complex. FPGAs enable cosimulation and emulation, leading to faster iteration of both design and verification efforts and thus better TTM.

FPGAs are so important in the hardware development process that I would even say you're not a serious hardware company if you don't have any FPGA frameworks to design silicon.

2) As others have mentioned, FPGAs are also critical for low-latency workloads that require constant tweaks-- high frequency trading (ugh...) comes to mind. The need for "constant tweaks" could also be satisfied with just "normal" software, but that has higher latency as opposed to an FPGA, and FPGAs can get some crazy performance if you're willing to pay the price (south of 7 figures).

Overall sure, usage of FPGAs might be niche compared to, idk, Javascript; but it's commonplace/practically essential in hardware.

seany• 6 years ago

For low volume (sub 100k units?) they're often the only good way to do configurable* SERDES in any environment that is latency sensitive.

Configurable as in one SKU is in several products, but not necessarily reconfigurable by the end user.

ATsch3• 6 years ago

It is very likely that the packets of this comment traveled through several FPGAs to get from your computer to my screen. Yes, they are definitely more niche than CPUs. But niche products have really high margins and people willing to pay for them.

FPGAs are already incredibly popular. They're just mostly in things you are unlikely to personally own or know about. You're going to find at minimum one, but probably more FPGAs in things like big routers and other telecom equipment, e.g. cell towers, firewalls, load balancers, enterprise wifi controllers, video conferencing hardware, test equipment like oscilloscopes, sensor buoys, scientific instruments, MRI machines, LIDARs, high end radio equipment, or even just glue logic tying together other components, like in the iphone.

bsder4• 6 years ago

I just have never seen the use case for FPGAs beyond niche prototyping / small run applications, which by definition make no money.

You are precisely correct. FPGAs are useful when your volume doesn't reach volumes where an ASIC would get amortized.

Networking companies (Cisco, Juniper, etc.) are classically big consumers of FPGAs.

Tektronix seems to make quite a bit of money and there is at least one FPGA in practically every test instrument they make. This holds true for practically all test instrument manufacturers.

I know a LOT of industrial automation and testing companies that generally have FPGAs in their systems. Both for latency and for legacy support (Yeah, GPIB still exists ...).

Yes, they aren't "Arm in a cell phone" type volumes, but that doesn't mean they aren't quite profitable if you can aggregate them.

ianhowson2• 6 years ago

It's the usual "fundamental difficulty" with FPGAs -- CPUs and GPUs are faster and more power efficient for compute-intensive tasks. An algorithm on FPGA needs to overcome the 20x worse architectural efficiency just to break even with a CPU or GPU.

The big benefit of having FPGA closely attached to CPU is that you can access the memory and internal buses quickly. Transferring stuff over PCIe hurts a lot. So you could make an argument for jobs using small work units requiring fast turnaround; CUDA kernels take milliseconds to launch.

I worked with some of the early Xeon+FPGA parts and there just wasn't that much we could do with them. There wasn't enough fabric to build anything meaningful and we had an abundance of CPU cores, so the best we could do was specialized I/O accelerators.

Symmetry• 6 years ago

I think the more relevant comparison here would be ASICs. Softcores on FPGAs are indeed terrible but if you're implementing some algorithm directly at the gate level for cryptography or signal processing or whatever then being able to arrange inputs outputs into dataflows is a big win with no roundrips to general purpose registers or bypass networks. Not having to fetch instructions and being limited in paralellism is also a big win. And generally if you're doing something like mining bitcoin you should expect an FGPA to perform somewhere between an ASIC and a GPU.

The problem is that if a task is common then someone is just going to make an ASIC to do it. And if its uncommon then the terrible FPGA software ecosystem and low prevalence of general purpose FPGAs in the wild mean that people will just do it on a CPU or GPU.

ip26• 6 years ago

It absolutely seems like there are some incredible opportunities in the high end. But as far as I know, FPGAs are quite area hungry which makes them inherently expensive. It's hard to think you'd find FPGAs of meaningful size included in $60 desktop CPUs, unless the harvesting opportunity is significant.

MrXOR• 6 years ago

But FPGAs are the future. They will put the CPU out of work almost entirely.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/01/31/when-will-fpgas-outw...

https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/03/19/fpga-maker-xilinx-sa...

petra• 6 years ago

What happened recently in AMD's market ?

AWS based ARM processor looks to be widely deployed in the cloud.Nvidia, the leader in GPU compute in buying ARM.Intel, which has suffered deeply because of their 10nm fab problems are going to work with TSMC.And AMD's P/E ratio is at 159, higher than Amazon's!

So Maybe AMD is looking to convert some inflated stock with a predictable business.

And it's better to invest in a predictable business that may have possible synergies with yours. Otherwise it looks bad to the stock market.

And Xilinx is probably the biggest company AMD can buy.

kbumsik• 6 years ago

Yup, in 2020 it's getting the new era of semiconductor industry.

Traster• 6 years ago

AMD's P/E is high but that's based on the fact that AMD earnings are $390m (2020Q3) vs. $6Bn (2020Q3) for Intel - essentially people are pricing in AMD being the obvious alternative to Intel in the data centre and the potential profit from that is enormous compared to AMD's current market share.

paulmd• 6 years ago

or another way of putting that is investors are jumping the gun and pricing in years and years of expected marketshare growth that haven't happened yet.

it's a relatively safe bet now that intel has more or less conceded leadership through 2023 but it's not zero risk. The market generally doesn't have an appreciation of that, P/E was still nuts even before the release of Zen2 when AMD's success was far less clear (Zen1/Zen+ were far less appealing products and scaled far less well into server class). It's a lot of amateurs (see: r/AMD_Stock on reddit) buying it because they like the company rather than trading on the fundamentals.

Right now the stock market is just nuts in general though, there's so much money from the Fed's injections sloshing around and looking for any productive asset, and tech companies look like a good bet when everyone is stuck at home, building home offices, consuming tech hardware and electronic media. Housing is getting even more weird as well.

01100011• 6 years ago

I don't know, but I been told... AMD margins aren't great. AMD is making phenomenal products lately but if they're giving them away to gain market share then they may never be as profitable as investors would like.

If Intel gets their house in order in a couple years, AMD won't have much time to gain market and raise prices. I've rooted for AMD since the K6 days but I think there's a risk that they'll always be #2(or less).

gvb2• 6 years ago

Everybody seems to view this as AMD mimicing Intel when it acquired Altera. (That acquisition has not born visible fruit.)

My contrarian speculation is that this is a move driven by Xilinx vs. Nvidia given Nvidia’s purchase of Arm and Xilinx’ push into AI/ML. Xilinx is threatened by Nvidia’s move given their dependence on Arm processors in their SOC chips and their ongoing fight in the AI/ML (including autonomous vehicles) product space. My speculation is that this gives Xilinx an alternative high performance AMD64 (and possibly lower performance & lower power x86) "hard cores" to displace the Arm cores.

Interesting times.

gmueckl3• 6 years ago

Why not license other softcores, e.g. from SiFive?

gvb2• 6 years ago

The performance of soft cores are significantly lower than hard cores.

Xilinx already has a RISC soft core in their MicroBlaze architecture so they don't have a pressing need for a low power, reasonable performance RISC soft core. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroBlaze

AMD has high performance CPUs being fabbed by TSMC (same foundry as Xilinx), so (theoretically) AMD CPUs can be grafted onto the Xilinx FPGA as a hard core.

With AMD and the MicroBlaze, they have the high performance and low power processor spectrum covered with no need for 3rd party licensing costs.

brandmeyer7• 6 years ago

FPGAs are to ASICs as interpreted languages are to compiled languages. I don't mean that literally, but I do mean it in the performance sense. At the same process node, an FPGA is over 50x the power and 1/20th the speed of a dedicated ASIC and it isn't getting any better.

rjsw4• 6 years ago

I'm guessing you didn't mean to write "softcores", licensing a SiFive design to be a hard core connected to the FPGA fabric would be one option.

ansible2• 6 years ago

And for their products that include hard cores, maybe they will switch to RISC-V like with the MicroSemi PolarFire.

I'm still debating on getting the Icicle development kit.

jl27182• 6 years ago

I don’t think NVidia/ARM would affect Xilinx much. Given what the bulk of FPGAs are doing in the data center, I think AMD was looking more at NVidia/Mellanox and of course Intel/Altera, but for networking, not compute. For Xilinx, this gives a path to board-level integration with x86.

andy_ppp3• 6 years ago

Or package level integration...

person_of_color• 6 years ago

What is the difference between hard and soft cores?

acallan• 6 years ago

A soft core is a CPU that is programmed into an FPGA instead of a "regular" core that is made of discrete components.

KSteffensen5• 6 years ago

Soft cores use the configurable logic matrix of the FPGA. You can choose to implement them or not, depending on your use case. They can also be tuned to the use case, adding or modifying CPU instructions, cache structure, e.t.c. This involves writing RTL code, with all the design, verification and backend synthesis work that comes with that. Tools like Synopsys ASIP Designer tries to help with this effort.

Hard cores are not part of the configurable logic matrix but are separate resources on the FPGA. That means they can't be tuned to the use case in the same way as a soft core. The trade-off is that they typically are better optimized with regards to clock frequency and power consumption since the components are made to be a CPU and not generic configurable logic. One example of an FPGA with a hard core CPU would be the Xilinx Zynq devices.

dreamcompiler2• 6 years ago

An FPGA is (to a very crude approximation) just a bunch of static RAM organized in an unusual way. If you think of normal static RAM as "address wires go in one side and data wires come out the other", in an FPGA there are no "address wires" -- it's all data in/data out. The memory cells are still just memory cells; what we label the wires is merely a matter of engineering perspective. In a Xilinx memory cell we choose labels for the wires typically used for logic gates.

Anyway in a Xilinx chip the bits of data you put in the memory cells determine what logic function gets executed. That works because in general any particular stored memory -- in any computer, anywhere -- is (conceptually) just a logic function, and conversely all logic is implementable with the stuff we conventionally call memory.

But we typically don't do that, because "real" logic made of fixed-function transistors is much faster than logic built with changeable memory cells. However, there's a market for fully-changeable logic--even if it's slower--and that's what Xilinx chips are.

Every CPU is just a bunch of registers and logic. If you hand me a few million discrete NAND gates, I can use them to build an X86, a RISC-V, and ARM, or whatever. It will be the size of a house and it will be very slow, but it will run the binary code for that processor. With a Xilinx chip, you have a few million NAND gates (or NOR gates or inverters or whatever you like) at your disposal and they're all on one chip and you can wire them up however you want with nothing but software. Bingo: You can build an X86 out of pure logic, and it's all on one chip rather than being the size of a house. That's a soft core.

The nice thing about soft cores is that you can build whatever CPU functions you want and leave off the functions you don't need. If you want to change the design, you just download a bunch of new bits to the Xilinx memory cells. Thus you can change an ARM into an X86 in an instant, without changing any hardware.

Soft cores are very flexible, but they're also slow, because implementing logic with static RAM cells is slower than doing it with dedicated transistors.

That's where hard cores come in: A hard core is a dedicated area of silicon on the Xilinx chip carved out to only implement an ARM chip or a PowerPC or other CPU with fixed-function transistors. So it's fast. The downside is you can't change its functionality on-the-fly. If you decide you'd rather have a PowerPC than an ARM chip you have to change the whole chip.

In both types of cores, you still have a bunch of memory cells left over that you can program to do whatever kind of logic you like.

ohazi3• 6 years ago

Also, the advantage Altera supposedly got after being acquired by Intel was better fab integration with what was then the best process technology available (High-end FPGAs genuinely need good processes).

1. That's no longer the case, so sucks for Altera / Intel

2. AMD doesn't have a fab, so any advantages are necessarily on the design / architecture / integration side.

dogma11382• 6 years ago

Intel got their 3D/2.5D stacking tech from Altera, the FPGA in Xeon sockets also is doing as well as it can considering the niche market.

andromeduck2• 6 years ago

My read on the Altera acc was that Intel needed to shore up fab volumes in the face of their foundry customers jumping to TSMC first chance they could. As the capital required per node continues to rise exponentially, they need more and more volume to amortize that over. This is also why they're trying to get into GPUs again.

totalZero• 6 years ago

Altera was already an Intel Custom Foundry partner before the acquisition. I'm not sure the 2015 acquisition was necessary to accomplish what you are describing.

baybal25• 6 years ago

I do not believe it makes sense to spend so much money for a niche, in a niche product like AI/ML chips.

And I believe AMD are good with using calculators.

datameta• 6 years ago

Being early on the ML hardware acceleration boat is going to pay off astronomically. Embedded inferencing is going to be a society defining technology by the time we hit mid-decade. It's already being used for predictive maintenance of machinery in IIoT with huge payoffs via decrease in unforeseen total machine failure or need of heavy overhauls.

m0zg• 6 years ago

I think you're onto something here. AMD is likely seeing the end of the road for their CPU business within the next decade, since it will run up against physics and truly insane cost structures that will come after 5nm. At the same time we're far past the practical limit wrt ISA complexity (as evidenced by periodic lamentations about AVX512 on this site). The only real way to go past all of that right now is specialized compute, reconfigurable on demand, deployment of which is hampered by the fact that it's very expensive and not integrated into anything, so the decision to use it is very deliberate, which in practice means it rarely ever happens at all. Bundle a mid-size FPGA as a standardized chiplet on a CPU, integrate it well, provide less painful tooling, and that will change. Want hardware FFT? You got it. Want hardware TPU for bfloat16? You got it. Want it for int8? You got it. Think of just being able to add whatever specialized instruction(s) you want to your CPU.

I'm not sure this is worth $35B, but if Lisa Su thinks so, it probably is. She's proven herself to be one of the most capable CEOs in tech.

WWLink• 6 years ago

My speculation is that this gives Xilinx an alternative high performance AMD64 (and possibly lower performance & lower power x86) "hard cores" to displace the Arm cores.

I'm trying to imagine an x86-based Ultascale+ style processor.

Hopefully AMD can help fix the mess known as vivado and the petalinux tools. lol.

FPGAhacker2• 6 years ago

Could be interesting. I prefer an independent Xilinx, but maybe competition with intel will stimulate the whole reconfigurable computing revolution that fizzled out.

mmrezaie3• 6 years ago

I understand that they need a big push in DPU market, but I do not understand why companies as big as AMD do not invest and build what they need in house? If anyone can, it is AMD that can gather the talent. Everyone was talking about future data centers, and as far as I can tell I have been hearing about heterogeneous IO since 2009 (and that's me, and I was hearing it while working on Xen).

To asnwer my question maybe the market is so volatile that they cannot do strategic planning like that?

dspillett• 6 years ago

why companies as big as AMD do not invest and build what they need in house?

Often it is an expertise thing, especially when buying smaller companies. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring

With larger purchases like this one that can still be part of the equation, though there is also the matter of lead times needed to bring a significant team and related infrastructure needed for the project(s) online and up to speed.

Also if a company is seen as ripe for buying, it can sometimes be done in part to stop a competitor getting a chance at the above advantages.

I suspect a mix of all three is at play here.

Guthur• 6 years ago

Hiring talent is hard and risky, especially in an area that you are actually expert.

The more risk option is the just acquire a company that's done it all for you.

Of course that does leave the merging part. But on paper it looks fast and easy.

mmrezaie3• 6 years ago

Dicipline of the company is more important than the talent. Oracle has a lot of talent, but they lack the discipline of generating anything novel. They buy the idea. Anyhow semi-conductor industry is different. Apple or Amazon played it in my opinion better although in vastly different markets.

CodeArtisan• 6 years ago

xilinx is the holder of more than 4000 patents.

mmrezaie3• 6 years ago

This is a good point, but it mostly matters when you are in middle of developign the strategy so that you can protect it and wanna have a robust plan. Maybe they are!

varispeed3• 6 years ago

I hope they will not drop their CPLD chips. They were made obsolete at least once but Xilinx fortunately decided to extend the support for a couple of more years. CPLD are very useful for repairing vintage gear where logic components fail and are no longer available (for example custom programmed PALs), so you can describe the logic in Verilog and often solder it in place of multiple chips. If they drop it then the only way to do it would be to use full blown FPGA which is a bit wasteful.

thrtythreeforty• 6 years ago

I would be very interested in reading a blog post about this. Is there one that I can read or you'd be willing to write?

varispeed3• 6 years ago

Have look at materials linked there http://dangerousprototypes.com/blog/2011/04/17/replacing-dis...

xiphias25• 6 years ago

This comment is off topic, but while I'm listening to the earnings call, I don't hear about specifically official PyTorch and Tensorflow support for AMD graphic cards. All the questions and answers are generic with buzzwords like AI, doubling down on our software support, but it doesn't give me confidence to change my NVIDIA GPU to an AMD one for the foreseeable future.

I remember the time when Elon Musk said to an analyst that he's asking boring questions to fill in his spreadsheet, and I'm feeling the same thing while listening to the earnings call.

ckastner• 6 years ago

My impression is that the accelerated computing side of AMD is receiving far, far too little attention. For example, their flagship GPU is still not officially supported by ROCm (AMD's answer to CUDA) [1]. Imagine the 2080 Ti not being supported by CUDA.

I've become a huge AMD fan, both because of their hardware, and because of their commitment to open source. But while the battles they have one against Intel on the x86 side are impressive, it seems that CUDA is leaving them far behind.

[1] https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/887

Tuna-Fish• 6 years ago

It likely will never have support. AMD chose to bifurcate their GPU designs into compute (CDNA) and games (RDNA) lines, with different architectures. RDNA sheds all the fancy features needed to support modern compute, thus gets more efficient in games that do not use it, but also cannot support the modern compute APIs.

xiphias25• 6 years ago

,,AMD ROCm is validated for GPU compute hardware such as AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs. Other AMD cards may work, however, they are not officially supported at this time.''

It seems like Lisa Su thinks that there's a separate ,,gamer market'' and ,,accelerator market''.

Jensen Huang understands that the same person can like to play games and train machine learning models on the same machine.

I'd love to switch to AMD CPU to have a portable laptop with low resource usage, as I spend most of my time travelling, but as GPUs in the cloud are overpriced (thanks to Jensen with separated pricing for servers), and internet in hotels are unpredictable, I don't want to train models in the cloud.

Anyways, Lisa said that she reads all comments about AMD, so I hope she'll listen :)

ksec3• 6 years ago

Yes I posted another link [1] for earning call but didn't get much traction / upvote. Although I have to admit Acquiring Xilinx is much bigger news.

Judging from watching the Financial News and reading analyst's comment for years. My feeling was that their Job was not to push for hard question or an honest answer. Their job is to push whatever interest they had with the company. So a spin for better long term prospect and downplay risk.

I was happy with the Enterprise results ( +116% YoY ) until I read this

Revenue was higher year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter due to higher semi-custom product sales and increased EPYC processor sales.

Semi-Custom is definitely PS5 and Xbox.

Basically I still dont see EPYC making enough inroad in the Server Market. And this is worrying, while the Stocks, Reviews, Hype are all going to AMD. No Results so far have shown Intel is hurt or AMD is making big gains in market shares and revenue shares.

The only good part I guess is Ryzen Mobile contribution to Computing and Graphics segment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24906314

xiphias25• 6 years ago

I can imagine that switching from Intel to AMD takes a bit of time for servers, as supporting 2 architectures at the same time is usually bad news for 99%-ile latencies for web services. At the same time x86 is a mature instruction set (as long as you don't use 512 bit vectorization, where things are getting tricky), so the transition shouldn't be that hard.

hajile2• 6 years ago

The server market moves and replaces slowly. Even when Intel was beating AMD by 30% or more it still took years for AMD percentages to drop.

AMD EPYC on AWS is 10.42% cheaper than Intel per hour across the board for m5 instances (9.6% cheaper for t3 instances). 7nm EPYC saves more than 10% power vs Intel 14nm and per-chip savings from buying AMD are way more than 10% vs similar Intel offerings. Why can Amazon spike prices that much? Because people will pay and still consider it a deal.

AMD's main issue still seems to be available due to do much competition for 7nm and tsmc being reluctant to build new fabs.

JackMcMack2• 6 years ago

Earnings calls never seem to have any hard questions. There was a projections miss a few quarters ago (very rare for amd), and even then the questions feel more like PR.

Semi-Custom is indeed PS5 and Xbox. This increase was expected of course. It's lower margins than other segments though.

Epyc adoption is indeed slower than I would've liked. But so far it has matched or beat short and long term projections from AMD.

Enterprise is weird. AMD has better price and performance? Let's buy Intel. Meltdown lowers performance? Let's compensate by buying more Intel. Intel is supply constrained? Let's complain, and still buy Intel.

My guess is Intel is still pressuring OEMs to favor Intel. Cloud providers are increasing adoption though, and there have been a few nice HPC wins.

And lets not forget that AMD is selling every chip they can, TSMC production is fully booked.

gpderetta• 6 years ago

Interestingly, Xilinx owns Solarflare. I wonder if that was part of the appeal.

tutanchamun• 6 years ago

Yeah, I thought so too since Nvidia owns Mellanox and Intel having their own NICs, OmniPath etc.

throwmemoney• 6 years ago

It is really funny when you find out that Intel uses Xilinx FPGAs for prototyping as they cannot get what they acquired (Altera) working in house to make things work.

rustybolt• 6 years ago

Source?

hongseleco• 6 years ago

I second this, I want details!

kyting2• 6 years ago

Intel uses Synopsys Zebu ASIC emulator, which essentially has Xilinx Ultrascale inside.

cjwinans79• 6 years ago

If true, ouch! Intel seems to be getting kicked every which way these days. Too complacent when they once ruled the roost.

tails4e11• 6 years ago

I imagine they are using a 3rd party prototyping solution like HAPS from synosys, which uses Xilinx FPGAs inside - for good reason, for quite some time Xilinx have had some very large devices built specifically for this market. It must sting a little bit though....

tgtweak• 6 years ago

Xilinx are very flexible and the tooling makes them even more effective.

If AMD wants to get serious in the datacenter/AI/ML space they need a xilinx-like approach to developing tooling. Cuda, nvenc, cudnn etc craps all over amd's offerings in the same space where they are even available.

AMD is prepping to take over datacenter terf and this puts them in a good place to bring a bigger offering.

nfriedly• 6 years ago

I'd like to see consumer-level CPU + GPU + FPGA products that emulators could take advantage of. I'm thinking of floating point math for PS2 right now, but I'm sure there are other examples where an FPGA could be beneficial.

teleforce2• 6 years ago

For those in ASIC and chip design industry, the two of the largest chip companies namely Intel and AMD buying two of the largest FPGA companies is inevitable, it's just a matter of "when" rather than "if".

I think the more interesting news is what they are going to do pro-actively with these mergers rather than just sitting on it.

I really hope their respective CEOs will take a page from the open source Linux/Android and GCC/LLVM revolutions. I'd say the chip makers companies are the ones that benefit most (largest beneficiary) from the these open source movement not the end users. To understand this situation we need to understand the economic rules of complementary goods or commodity [1].

In the case of chip makers if the price of designing/researching/maintaining OS like Linux/Android and the compilers infrastructure is minimized (i.e. close to zero) they can basically sell the hardware of their processors at a premium price with handsome profits. If on another hand, the OSes and the compilers are expensive, their profit will be inversely proportional to the complementary elements' (e.g. OSes & compilers) prices.

Unfortunately as of now, the design tools or CAD software for hardware design and programming, and also parallel processing design tools are prohibitively expensive, disjointed and cumbersome (hence expensive manpower), and if you're in the industry you know that it's not an exaggeration.

Having said that, I think it's the best for Intel/AMD and the chip design industry to fund and promote robust free and open source software development tools for their ASIC design including CPU/GPU/TPU/FPGA combo design.

IMHO, ETH Zurich's LLHD [2] and Chris Lattner's LLVM effort on MLIR [3] are moving in the right direction for pushing the envelope and consolidation of these tools (i.e. one design tool to rule them all). If any Intel or AMD guys are reading this you guys need to knock your CEO/CTO's doors and convinced them to make these complementary commodity (design and programming tools) as good and as cheap as possible or better free.

[1]https://www.jstor.org/stable/2352194?seq=1

[2]https://iis.ee.ethz.ch/research/research-groups/Digital%20Ci...

[3]https://llvm.org/devmtg/2019-04/slides/Keynote-ShpeismanLatt...

MayeulC• 6 years ago

I don't recall where I read this, but hardware vendors have been trying to comoditize software, and vice-versa.

It's really obvious when you think about it. If you sell nails, you want to make sure that everyone has or can afford a hammer, and hammer manufacturers like to make sure that there is a large supply of compatible nails.

As much as I would like to see it, I am not sure the equation is that simple in the case of CAD software. Sure, that would make it easier to use FPGAs, but it would also make it easier to create competing products, as a stretch.

I still think it's worth it, and wish bitcode format was documented, at the very least.

johnwalkr• 6 years ago

Xilinx Zynq and Ultrascale series are multiple Ghz ARM cores plus FPGA. They're incredibly useful for small volume niche use cases and to give an example from my industry, becoming popular in space applications. The reason is hardware qualification/verification is extremely expensive but a change to FPGA fabric is not.

My point is Xilinx have already proven ARM CPU+FPGA on one die and I think AMD CPU+FPGA is very likely to be a success.

Between this, ARM adoption, Apple Silicon and similar offerings (which kind of skipped ARM+FPGA for ARM+ASIC), RISC-V, it's like 1992 again with exciting architectures. Only this time software abstraction is much better so there is not a huge pressure to converge on only 1-2 architectures.

panpanna• 6 years ago

ARM + ASIC? Isn't that simply a SoC?

Edit: technically, the arm part is also ASIC, but you get what I mean

beezle• 6 years ago

So who are left in the fpga space? Lattice?

ohazi3• 6 years ago

You can still buy Altera FPGAs, and you'll still be able to buy Xilinx FPGAs -- they're not going to just throw away a three billion dollar business.

Lattice is probably the next biggest. There's also Microchip (< Microsemi < Actel), Quicklogic, and Gowin.

Nobody really came close to competing with Altera / Xilinx at the high end, though.

duskwuff3• 6 years ago

Not a lot. Actel was acquired by MicroSemi in 2010, and MicroSemi was in turn acquired by Microchip in 2018.

There's a couple of upstarts in China like Gowin and Anlogic, but they haven't made much of an impact in the larger market yet.

imtringued• 6 years ago

I would rather see Processing in Memory (PIM) become mainstream than FPGAs. FPGAs are basically an assembly line that you can change overnight. Excellent at one task and they minimize end to end latency but if it's actually about performance you are entirely dependent on the DSP slices.

With PIM your CPU resources grow with the size of your memory. All you have to do is partition your data and then just write regular C code with the only difference being that it is executed by a processor inside your RAM.

Having more cores is basically the same thing as having more DSP slices. Since those cores are directly embedded inside memory they have high data locality which is basically the only other benefit FPGAs have over CPUs (assuming same number of DSP and cores). Obviously it's easier to program than either GPUs or FPGAs.

nickff3• 6 years ago

You're comparing two completely different paradigms.

FPGAs are not an assembly line at all; the assembly line analogy applies much more closely to a processor's pipeline.

FPGAs are just a massive set of very simple logic units which can be interconnected in many different ways. FPGAs are best used in situations where you want to perform a series of simple operations on a massive incoming dataset, in parallel, especially in real-time situations. Performing domain transforms on data coming in from sensor arrays is one very good application for FPGAs.

qwertox• 6 years ago

Are FPGAs rewritable at will with almost no degradation (for example a rewrite every minute over many days), or do they suffer the same degradation problems as EEPROMs (like the ones in Arduinos)?

charlesdaniels2• 6 years ago

I think GP meant in the sense that reconfiguration time is large. FPGAs cannot be effectively time-division multiplexed, as a full reconfiguration can take up to tens of seconds.

GP is also correct that DSP/SRAM blocks are critical to performance. FPGAs are not very efficient at raw compute if you have to synthesize everything out of LEs.

The performance benefit of FPGAs, which PIMs also share (in theory, there aren't any PIMs ready for real-world deployment AFAIK) is that they can leverage much larger memory bandwidths than general purpose CPUs can. An FPGA might run at a lower clock rate (low 100s of MHz), but be able to operate on several kb per clock cycle. This can work really well when paired with off-chip logic to convert high rate serial interfaces to lower clock rate parallel interfaces, then back after the FPGA is done processing.

There is also a lot of work going on in the space of time-division multiplexing FPGAs effectively. The two main approaches are overlay architectures and partial reconfiguration. The former implements another high-level fabric on top of the FPGA which will be less general-purpose, but can be reconfigured faster. The latter is a feature vendors have added to some high-end chips where specific regions of the FPGA can be reconfigured without affecting other regions.

legulere• 6 years ago

Having memzero and memcpy happen in memory without polluting caches would already be a huge gain.

ohazi3• 6 years ago

Please, God, no.

The surface area for security vulnerabilities is already impossibly high. Do we really want to add "firmware running on a DIMM exfiltrating key material" to that list?

AnthonyMouse• 6 years ago

Though you could presumably just do the same thing with new instructions, i.e. have an instruction for secure zeroing which zeros the data in any memory or cache where it exists but doesn't cause the zeros to be cached anywhere they weren't already.

mkhalil• 6 years ago

Well considering how Ryzen Master runs, I don't have much hope for Xilinx's software to get better by this acquisition.

SemiTom• 6 years ago

The apparent driver here isn’t about AMD wanting to get into the FPGA business. The real motivation appears to be a combination of platforms and programmable chiplets. There are two problems that programmable chips address https://semiengineering.com/amd-wants-an-fpga-company-too/

galaxyLogic2• 6 years ago

Are FPGAs any good seems to be the discussion. Well they must be good for something because:

"... Across the different market segments where it operates, Xilinx brought in revenues of $767 million last quarter."

https://siliconangle.com/2020/10/27/official-amd-snap-xilinx...

6d65• 6 years ago

Probably makes sense as a business decision.

In my opinion, I would also like for AMD to invest in ML tooling while they have the cash.

I hope one day Pytorch, XLA, Glow would have native AMDGPU support, and I will be able to buy a couple Radeon 6000 series cards, undervolt them and make a good ML box.

I think AMD gpus on TSMC 7nm, then maybe even 5nm, will have the best performance or watt. Even though they might be 10% or 20% slower than the alternative. For me performance per watt and dollar is more important.

Anyway, it's sad that they couldn't make a 5 to 10 people (I might be too optimistic) engineering team that would make their product relevant in this market.

AMD to Acquire Xilinx

Related Stories