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.'"

Comments

The new thing is the hype(r)transport

[nietsch]

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!

Fair points

[Morosoph]

However, it's still a middle-ground between non-progammable dedicated hardware and another CPU.

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.

Open protocols win!

[maxwell demon]

I think the most important sentence in the article is this:

AMD's decision to open Hypertransport could end up being a key factor in Opteron's future success.

Analog data analysis and general calculus, IMO

[CFD339]

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.