By: Howard Chu (hyc.delete@this.symas.com), October 29, 2020 6:25 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
anonymou5 (no.delete@this.spam.com) on October 29, 2020 9:52 am wrote:
> > The die size for an FPGA that can make good use of the IF bandwidth and do something
> > worth replacing a CPU chiplet with is going to be a fair bit bigger than the CPU chiplet
> > I think. The Rome package is already pretty full, so I think you'd probably need to
> > sacrifice multiple chiplets, probably even half of them to make it work.
> >
> > It might be more practical, particularly in the short term to allow pairing a specially packaged
> > FPGA with a normal CPU in a 2-socket system, using the FPGA transceivers to implement the inter-chip
> > variant of Infinity Fabric and also supporting the existing DRAM slots. For the very short term
> > you could also do PCIe between sockets as well, although then you loose cache coherencey.
>
> Past attempts by AMD and Intel weren't exactly stunning commercial successes.
>
> The term "solution looking for a problem" comes to mind, to be honest.
Intel's Xeon 6138P probably didn't get much traction, but then again, it also cost 5x as much as the Xeon 6138 without integrated FPGA.
> > The die size for an FPGA that can make good use of the IF bandwidth and do something
> > worth replacing a CPU chiplet with is going to be a fair bit bigger than the CPU chiplet
> > I think. The Rome package is already pretty full, so I think you'd probably need to
> > sacrifice multiple chiplets, probably even half of them to make it work.
> >
> > It might be more practical, particularly in the short term to allow pairing a specially packaged
> > FPGA with a normal CPU in a 2-socket system, using the FPGA transceivers to implement the inter-chip
> > variant of Infinity Fabric and also supporting the existing DRAM slots. For the very short term
> > you could also do PCIe between sockets as well, although then you loose cache coherencey.
>
> Past attempts by AMD and Intel weren't exactly stunning commercial successes.
>
> The term "solution looking for a problem" comes to mind, to be honest.
Intel's Xeon 6138P probably didn't get much traction, but then again, it also cost 5x as much as the Xeon 6138 without integrated FPGA.