Intel to Set Its FPGA Unit Free to Pursue Its Own Path

Re:Intel to Set Its FPGA Unit Free to Pursue Its Own Path – ... by mikewarot on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @02:08PM (#37769244)

The right kind of sea of LUTs can outperform anything even if it's clocked at 100 Mhz... the trick is to get a pipeline filled, instead of trying to outrun light.

Imagine an LLM with a new token every 10 nS

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Re:Intel to Set Its FPGA Unit Free to Pursue Its Own Path – ... by coryrc on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @10:46PM (#37774371)

But you can't fit that "sea" into a processor core as a separate unit powered by unique instructions (like an FPU or ALU) because the speed demands the cache and ALU be there (or else it can't run at 3GHz any more). Once it's not that close it doesn't make sense to be on the same chip; maybe a neighboring chiplet. But anybody could do that.

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Re:Intel to Set Its FPGA Unit Free to Pursue Its Own Path – ... by jeffreygoesto on Thursday October 05, 2023 @03:48AM (#37775877)

It is a totally different way of programming and thinking though and you need to spend a lot of thought on design to make it really fast. We could outpace a 3GHz CPU with a Zynq for image processing but it needs some really good FPGA people and the right split between CPU and FPGA. Nothing the average programmer wants to dive into, more something for cost and power sensitive markets with a relative fixed task, not needing ASICs yet. For networks it could pay off if you have the right amountof multipliers in the right places, but only then. As you wrote, don't leave the chip during the processing and you are good to go.

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