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Start-up Could Kick Opteron into Overdrive
An anonymous reader writes "The Register is reporting that a new start-up, DRC Computer, has created a reprogrammable co-processor that can slot directly into Opteron sockets. This new product has the potential to boost the Opteron chips well ahead of their Xeon-based competition. From the article: 'Customers can then offload a wide variety of software jobs to the co-processor running in a standard server, instead of buying unique, more expensive types of accelerators from third parties as they have in the past.'"
Rendering comes to mind, but I'm biased. But I'm sure that a glorified graphics card isn't the most interesting use...
If these become popular enough, will we be seeing a back-end to GCC for this FPGA?
Wikileaks, no DNS
I'm sorry but 5k for a little chip that makes my opteron a little faster? I could just buy another opteron for that price: http://www.pricewatch.com/cpu/419325-1.htm> The price is supposed to drop to 3k next year. How does this affect cooling?
There are plenty of others that have tried this, and plenty of them failed. A FGPA does have a significantly slower clockspeed and you need to have fairly sophisticated software that can make most of the flexible design. Before this thing came out in most instances it turned out to be cheaper to buy more horsepower and staying on a regular hardwareprogramming path than to risk it with special hard and software.
These guys claim their stuff is cheaper than more horsepower and that you get the extra speedboost from the hypertransport (over pci).
It clearly is a pr-release that has been regurgitated by a lazy journalist, as I found no or few critical notes, something this product might deserve. for one thing I don't see how they have solved the special software & programmers problem or how they really have taclked the economics of scale: this thing costs a couple of grands, vs a couple of hundres for a amd top notch processor. the regular processor has double cores and runs an order of magnitude faster than the fpga. The scarecity of programmers that can write software for this thing adds another order of magnitude to the wrong side of the equation.
Roughly, the fgpa solution must be a thousand times quicker/better than the regular-proc-with-lots-of-horsepower solution. I don't see that happen soon.
OTOH, the rosy images of a computer that can render a pixar animation in a few minutes the next mintes be used as a realtime sound-processing thing or simulate a neural net with as much neurons in it as in the human brain, that makes the geek in me drool. Computer, tell me it isn't so!
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Dedicated Hardware goes one hell of a lot faster.
An FPGA doesn't equal dedicated hardware. It takes a performance hit (in some domains, a huge hit) in exchange for flexibility. It also requires code that supports it.
The first set of DRC modules will consume about 10 - 20 watts versus close to 80 watts for an Opteron chip.
People buying USD$5000 coprocessors, plus the cost of developing specialized code to use them, don't cut corners on the basis of their electric bill.
Also, power consumption matters if you've got a rack of these things in a small space and need to keep them cool. Five times as many systems might need a larger server room.
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The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The sweet spot for plug in like this, IMO, would be similar to what you see a few board manufacturers doing now -- digital signal processing routines like Fourier transforms and other general calculus functions that are used in all kinds of data analysis where raw data comes in as analog variations, or where the moment by moment changes in state need to be modeled for engineering applications like fluid dynamics and harmonics.
I'd imagine you'll need to have the application compiled in such a way that it is aware of the additional processing capability, so its not likely to be a plug-n-pray solution to your general game player's graphical wet dreams.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
As a cranky engineer, I find this ... sweet.
The best phrase to help the system design effort is data flow.
How does the machine chop up the task for the most performance?
The major problem in design is finding where to place the dotted line that says "cut here". Software mavens know this as refactoring, or partitioning.
The gotcha in development would be to ignore the internal architecture of the FPGA.
As a word of advice to the beginner, look carefully at the FPGA data flow, and try to decompose the algorithm ( or find a similar one) so that the data manipulation and movement fits the part as best as possible.
Just having an HDL is not enough, the neophyte hardware designer can easily write code that cannot be synthesised to work, let alone fit the part. A sensitivity to the underlying hardware is needed.
As an example of this, using hand crafted hardware design, Chuck Moore wrung several times the expected clock performance for a hardware Forth engine. A starting point for reading might be:
http://www.ultratechnology.com/cowboys.html
Using hand-crafting, you can get enormous processing gains, but the hardware and system designs have to be well understood.
Perhaps the GNU uber-geeks could handle the translation efforts to make a tool for the average application programmer, but until then the brave soul who tackles these efforts should be prepared to learn a lot of the edges of computer science, hardware, and system design. It's not a horrible job, just long. And the problem should be worthy of the efforts needed.
This is progress?
I think the parent was suggesting that CPU-socket devices could be produced that were marketed as GPUs but could be used to assist other CPU-bound processes. Whether or not said devices are designed as graphics chips or general-purpose logic devices is another question.
WRT your vehicular analogy, there are people who buy cars and want to use them as trucks occasionally, and people who buy trucks but sometimes just use them as cars. It's no big deal.