One of the key benefits of Intel's solution is that the CPU and FPGA share the same RAM, avoiding the O(N) cost of moving data to/from the devices. This type of a zero-copy transaction can enable very high performance applications compared with dedicated discrete cards.

AMD already does "Zero Copy transfers" (the on-chip cache!!) with its "Fusion" APUs (ex: A10-7850K) for CPU <<---->> GPU.

I'm not really seeing loads of people taking advantage of the feature however. The platform is cheap, the technology is available but its just way too weird an architecture to become mainstream.

There are numerous benefits: the CPU can create a linked list or graph, and the memory will still be valid on the GPU. CPU / GPU atomics are unified, and GPUs can even call CPU functions under AMD's HSA platform.

* https://images.anandtech.com/doci/7677/20%20-%20HSA%20Use%20...

* http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/hsa10.pdf

* https://www.anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a8-760...

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I think Intel had a similar technology implemented on their "Crystalwell" chips, which were basically an L4 cache which provided a high-bandwidth link between the CPU and GPU (although not quite as flexible).

No, its not an FPGA, but OpenCL / GPGPU compute seems to be a bit more mainstream than FPGA compute at the moment. I haven't seen too much excitement in general for this feature however.

>I'm not really seeing loads of people taking advantage of the feature however. The platform is cheap, the technology is available but its just way too weird an architecture to become mainstream.

AMD sells a consumer product. For most consumers even a smartphone offers enough CPU and GPU performance. The content producers who care about performance usually buy the best CPU and GPU. HSA isn't available on AMD's Ryzen or Threadripper processors.

Intel is trying to sell to datacenters where performance or energy efficiency is a major selling point.

> The content producers who care about performance usually buy the best CPU and GPU. HSA isn't available on AMD's Ryzen or Threadripper processors.

Raven Ridge will be based on Zen CPU cores and Vega GPU cores. But naturally, Raven Ridge will be slower than Threadripper because the GPU will take up some space (that otherwise would have been additional CPU cores).

Rumored specs of Raven Ridge APU is 4 CPU cores and 11 GPU Compute Units. In contrast, Threadripper is around 16 CPU Cores and Vega 64 is 64 GPU cores, separated by a PCIe x16.

So basically, its the price you pay for sticking so many things onto a single package. There are thermal limits, as well as manufacturing limits (ie: practical yield sizes) to how large these chips can be.

If you want the best of both worlds, like an EPYC CPU with Vega 64 or a high-end NVidia Pascal / Volta chip, you'll need to buy a dedicated GPU and a dedicated CPU. True, a hybrid chip like Raven Ridge (or any of the AMD HSA stuff) has benefits with regards to communication, but the penalty to CPU speed and/or GPU speed seems to be huge.

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I personally expect that if any "mainstream" FPGA solutions come out, they'll be connected to the PCIe and not merged into the CPU. There seems to be just too many heat and manufacturing issues to make a merged product compared to the standard PCIe x16, which is quite fast.

Alternatively, certain tasks (like Cryptography) can be accelerated using dedicated instructions, like the Intel AES-NI instruction set. Or Intel's Quicksync H.264 encoding solution. Fully Dedicated chipspace (like AES-NI) is way faster and more power efficient than FPGAs after all.

Maybe they could offer a good (maybe open?) toolchain, online partial reprogramming?

The words Intel and “open” do not really belong in the same sentence.

Idunno, Xeon Phi, their GPUs since about 2007 (though a lot better recently), good cooperation and documentation with their NICs, direct participation in both major open compiler toolchains, all the stuff that 01.org lists... I think they're doing pretty well with open (aside from the products themselves, but that's kinda the point of having a company).

Frankly Intel has done an adequate to good job of providing open source software to interact with all of their hardware for as long as I've been computering. They're the one vendor that has never told me to install a proprietary driver.

You can’t even use their main product without loading in opaque binary blobs and agreeing to a backdoor.

That's true, that's my greatest gripe with them. It's a major part of why I'm looking to other platforms for my workstation.

That said, you can't escape that with their nearest competitor, so it's a bit of a moot point for now.

Intel really don't do anything unless they already have a market for it. They have bundled with Xeons in the past.

If there turns out to be a market (which comes down to tools and cloud platform to make this existing tech much more accessible) then it'll be huge and they'll need to be part of it.