Items tagged with fpga
While they often aren’t as great as CPUs on their own, FPGAs can do a wonderful job accelerating specific tasks. Whether it's accelerating acting as a fabric for wide-scale datacenter services boosting AI performance, an FPGA in the hands of a capable engineer can offload a wide variety of tasks from a CPU and speed processes along. Intel has talked a big game about integrating Xeons with FPGAs over the last six years, but it hasn't resulted in a single product hitting its lineup. A new patent by AMD, though, could mean that the FPGA newcomer might be ready to make one of its own. In October, AMD announced plans to acquire Xilinx as part of a big push into the datacenter. On Thursday, the...
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You would think yesterday's unveiling of Zen 3 would be AMD's biggest news this week, along with a performance tease of its upcoming Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards. Arguably even bigger, however, is that AMD is reportedly in talks to acquire Xilinx, a maker of FPGA (field programmable gate array) chips, for north of $30 billion. It would be a massive acquisition, and one AMD can afford these days, having roughly tripled its stock price over the past year. AMD now has a market capitalization of more than $100 billion, which is basically a measure of the company's value based its current stock price (a company's actual value is a little more complex). FPGA chips differ from standard computer...
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Fully-assembled MiSTer FPGA DIY console It seems like it wasn't too long ago that we crowned the Raspberry Pi 4 as one of the best retro game consoles around. Indeed, the Raspberry Pi foundation's latest single-board computer still a low-cost DIY powerhouse. However, retro gamers are picky about one thing that haunts many software emulation solutions that run on the likes of the Pi 4 or an NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV -- and that's lag. Thanks to a talented group of developers and some off-the-shelf parts, the MiSTer project aims for a lag-free, higher quality, more accurate retro gaming experience. Built on the Terasic DE10-nano (an Intel-based System-on-Chip (SoC) FPGA board), the MiSTer...
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While testifying before Congress over the Cambridge Analytical privacy scandal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly talked about the need to further develop artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to tackle several of the challenges the company currently faces. Apparently that includes designing its own chips, too. Facebook is looking to hire silicon design engineers to develop ASIC and FPGA hardware that will drive its next generation technologies. The job listing does not go into great detail about Facebook's semiconductor plans, though it does mention designing semi-custom and fully custom ASICs. By assembling its own chip design team, Facebook would ultimately make itself less reliant...
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It's taken a few years, but Intel has finally started sampling to customers its Stratix 10, the industry's first 14-nanometer field programmable array (FPGA). This is something chip designer Altera tapped Intel to do back in 2013, though it hit delays along the way. Nevertheless, when Intel acquired Altera last year for $16.7 billion, it assured clients and investors that Altera's ARM-based chips would still be developed going forward. Well, here we are. Stratix 10 meshes Intel's 14nm tri-gate process technology with a new architecture called HyperFlex. It features an embedded quad-core 64-bit ARM processor (Cortex-A53), 5.5-million logic elements, and second generation High Bandwidth Memory...
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In June of last year, Intel announced a $16.7B acquisition of chip designer Altera, a Silicon Valley bellwether known for producing FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), PLDs (Programmable Logic Devices), Embedded Processors, and ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits). At the time of the announcement, Intel CEO Bryan Krzanich said, “Intel’s growth strategy is to expand our core assets into profitable, complementary market segments. With this acquisition, we will harness the power of Moore’s Law to make the next generation of solutions not just better, but able to do more.” That’s a nebulous way of saying Intel had plans to leverage Altera technology to boost its own profits, which...
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For years, we've heard rumors that Intel was building custom chips for Google or Facebook, but these deals have always been assumed to work with standard hardware. Intel might offer a different product SKU with non-standard core counts, or a specific TDP target, or a particular amount of cache -- but at the end of the day, these were standard Xeon processors. Today, it looks like that's changing for the first time -- Intel is going to start embedding custom FPGAs into its own CPU silicon. The new FPGA-equipped Xeons will occupy precisely the same socket and platform as the standard, non-FPGA Xeons. Nothing will change on the customer front (BIOS updates may be required), but the chips should...
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Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia's CEO, is a canny and intelligent leader who has capably helmed the company through both rough patches and successes, not least of which is the recently launched GTX 680. He's known for strong opinions, but not crazy, off-the-wall statements, which is why his recent remarks regarding Intel are so surprising. Speaking to a group of analysts last week, Jen-Hsun casually suggested that Intel, one of Nvidia's chief rivals and competitors, ought to open up its foundries and manufacture hardware for the ARM SoC ecosystem. "Why not be a foundry for all the mobile companies?" Huang said. “There’s no shame in that." No shame -- but an awful lot of crazy. Intel has made...
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Intel made headlines earlier this week when the company announced it would be selling foundry space to FPGA designer/manufacturer Achronix. This isn't the sort of strategic move we normally we see from Intel; the manufacturing giant has been able to avoid licensing its production capacity to other companies in order to meet costs. The Achronix deal doesn't imply any sort of long-term strategy change from Intel, but it could be a sign that the company is looking to acquire smaller companies. The term FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Array; such processors are designed to be capable of emulating a variety of hardware features in software. While this sort of emulation is inevitably much slower...
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You've probably never heard of Pico Computing, and that's just fine. The company works mostly undercover, out of the line of sight from most citizens. It sounds like a story from a James Bond movie, but the company's execution is real: they're in the business of cracking codes, digging into top secret transmissions and giving their customers the ability to figure out what enemies are saying. It's a modern day spy story, and there's great potential for Pico to grow monumentally. The company was founded in 2004 in Seattle, and they currently sell a "a desktop-size supercomputer aimed at the modern-day equivalent of Bletchley Park's cipher-geeks: military and government agencies that need to turn...
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