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

Re:So...

[BenjyD]

The article mentions applications in gas and oil companies. I would guess that means things like:

- MINLP/MILP (Wikipedia article is a bit weak) and Branch and Bound optimisation for things like pipeline routing, well selection etc.
- fluid mechanics for pipeline design
- geological data-mining for finding reservoirs
Those kind of jobs can have runtimes measured in days and weeks, so an accelerator could make a real difference.

Re:Berkeley

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

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.

You're quite right that these are not for you - their to run highly specialised calculations (the oil & gas industries are mentioned in TFA).

They make some operations much faster (think of a hardware mpeg decoder, useless for most things, but much more efficient for the single thing it can do then a general purpose CPU)

How does this affect cooling?

These things consume 10-20 watts compared to an Opeteron's 80, so it's affect on cooling is minimal (far less then adding the second opteron that you propose)

About Time!

[evilviper]

I have to say, I'm surprised it has taken so long. Seems a few years past-due, IMHO.

One of first signs that PCs needed an FPGA or similar was hardware MPEG capture cards... They could do the job so much faster, and so much cheaper than your primary CPU, that the alternative is disappearing.

High-end graphics cards have been the most telling development. It's not that OpenGL is something magical, it's just that an ASIC can do many things so much better than a CPU that transfering much, much more raw data over the bus was still cheaper than actually processing it (despite the fact that interrupts are rather costly themselves).

PS2 clusters, Crypto cards, Hardware-accelerated NICs, SLI, all are a symptom of almost excatly the same problem...

The rising popularity of GPU programming made it extremely clear that there is a vaccuum here. Using the videocard isn't a very good method to accomplish this, just a stop-gap necessity. I thought from the beginning that FPGAs would become like the old math-coprocessors, and have their own motherboard socket, but neither AMD nor Intel were stepping up to fill this clear need. Installing it into a normal CPU socket, to get around this appathy, is a very clever hack I hadn't thought of.

I expect, with popularity, it will be cheaper to put a custom FPGA socket on motherboards, rather than building a full-fledged SMP motherboard for the purpose. After that, who knows... Maybe FPGAs will go the way of the math-coprocessors and get itegrated into future CPUs.

I know if I was running ATI or NVidia (or Hauppauge, or Level5), I'd be very worried about this thing eating the most profitable segment of my market.

Re:About Time!

[TheRaven64]

I was at a talk by Bob Colwell a few weeks ago. One of the points he made was that within the next ten years we will be able to (economically) fit far more transistors on a chip than we realistically know what to do with. His example was using all of that space to have a vast array of P6 cores. If you did this, then:

1. You would not be able to get enough power to the chip to make it work.
2. You would not be able to dissipate the heat that it would draw.
3. You would not be able to get enough data to it for more than about 10% (on a good day) of the chip real-estate to be actually doing anything.

One possible solution is to have a hundred or so general purpose cores, and fill the rest up with simple algorithmic accelerators (e.g. FFT, crypto, [i]D{C,W}T, etc). These would spend most of their time turned off (not using power), but when a workload hit the chip that needed them they could be turned on to give a significant performance boost.

An old method, not really suitable nowadays

[Flying pig]

Worked fine in the days of embedded systems when all memory was static (and usually only 16 bits wide), also when it was easy to wire an interrupt line so when the add-on had finished you could read the results. Nowadays much more difficult because of the need to integrate with DRAM controllers and timing, absence of convenient interrupts ( so need to poll a location to see when it completed). Whereas Hypertransport is designed to do the job and do it efficiently.

Another nice approach was the "swinging gate" RAM method in which you had two blocks of physical RAM in the same memory space. The main CPU filled one block with data, then flicked the switch so the co-processor could read that data while the CPU read the results from the other block, then put in new data for processing in the next cycle. Very easy to implement, much cheaper than FIFOs. It meant you could use a cheap DSP (from TI) in a system using a cheaper 8086 series processor for which you could get cheap tools and an embedded OS.

Might we ever have socketed Hypertransport GPU's?

[Dr. Spork]

The fact that this is practical has made me wonder how well it would work to use a motherboard socket for a GPU. With Hypertransport it would have absolutely direct access to system ram and could help itself to as much as it needed. I would love to be able to use standard CPU heatsinks on a GPU.

But what I find really exciting about this idea is that once the GPU is in the motherboard, I'm sure programmers would find an easy way to use all that logic to do calculations - say, media encoding. Heck, I know they are trying to do this with GPU's on cards, but this would be a much lower latency connection.

I wonder how this would affect total system cost. I mean, I know multi-socket mobos will always cost more, but then again, when the GPU is a chip instead of a card, that should bring costs down. Also, they could ditch all that PCI-e logic and those slots. Upgrading would definitely be cheaper, and can you imagine two socketed GPUs on the mobo running a Hypertransport version of SLi? That might be the fastest, quietest gaming rig ever!