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Intel Launches Atom CPU With Integrated FPGA

Posted by Soulskill on from the made-to-order dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Intel is quite clearly serious about offering competition to ARM in the embedded market, and has just announced a new Atom processor series that offers a unique selling point: an integral FPGA processor. Billed as 'the first configurable Intel Atom-based processor,' the Atom E600C series combines an Intel Atom 'Tunnel Creek' chip with an Altera Field Programmable Gate Array — offering, the company claims, significantly more flexibility for ODMs and OEMs."

35 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Awesome by phantomcircuit · · Score: 4, Informative

    Assuming it's priced relatively reasonably, that is fucking awesome.

    1. Re:Awesome by arivanov · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It is not the pricing which is interesting here, it is will there be anticompetitive marketing restrictions.

      Atom was intentionally crippled through pairing with crippled 5+ year old video and a specific resolution restriction for systems with it. After NVidia broke this restriction it was redesigned to exclude it.

      i815e was intentionally crippled to 512 RAM through a marketing restriction so that RDRAM and 840 and 820 sell.

      Turning off SMP anywhere they could turn it off for 10 years since PPro so that the "server varieties" of the same chip (often from the same tray) sell.

      And so on.

      Intel has a long history of shooting itself in the foot on non-cannibalisation grounds. I suspect it shot itself here as well. This can make a phenomennal HPC platform due to its motherboard "real estate" and cooling requirements, however that will eat into Intel Xeon + QPI enabled FPGA sales. So I guess it will be crippled through marketing to disallow that.

      FFS, it does not take a genius to understand the basic idea that "If there is money in it, someone else will cannibalise it for you, so you might as well cannibalise yourself and expand the market".

      --
      Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
      http://www.sigsegv.cx/
    2. Re:Awesome by Elbereth · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Dude, everyone does that. AMD/ATI does it, Nvidia does it, IBM does it, Motorola used to do it, and if Apple ever designed/manufactured anything themselves, they would do it, as well. It's called marketing. Those $1000 "Extreme" CPUs that Intel sells only cost about $100 to manufacture, if that. Probably only $25 or $50. How do you think Intel recoups its R&D costs? It prices the high end chips as high as the market will allow, then sells the mid-range chips for a more reasonable price.

      Did you forget that AMD was selling Athlon XP and Athlon MP chips at wildly different prices, even though you could enable MP on the Athlon XP by drawing on them with a pencil? What about disabling MP every one of the later Athlon chips? Even some Opteron chips have MP disabled! That's seriously wrong, in my opinion. As far as I know, no Xeon has ever had MP disabled. Say what you will about Intel, but if you buy a Xeon, you know what you're getting.

      What do you want Intel to do, anyways? Sell all their CPUs at manufacturing cost, with no feature differentiation at all? So that everyone can buy Xeon MP chips for $50 each? Yeah. OK. Let's see how long that lasts. I'd say Intel would be bankrupt in less than a year.

      Seriously, dude, if you want cheap SMP motherboards and CPUs, go shop on ebay for used stuff from failed dotcoms. That's what I used to do. I even scored some high-end server-grade hardware, like DEC Alpha CPUs, SCSI RAID enclosures, SCSI drives, and smart UPSes. There's no need to rant about Intel's "anti-competitive" tactics, of which exactly zero legitimate examples exist in your post. Intel has done some pretty shitty things in the past, but this isn't one of them. Save your rant for something that matters.

    3. Re:Awesome by Man+On+Pink+Corner · · Score: 4, Funny

      Dude, everyone does that. AMD/ATI does it, Nvidia does it, IBM does it, Motorola used to do it, and if Apple ever designed/manufactured anything themselves, they would do it, as well.

      Dude, WTF? If Apple were any more vertically-integrated they'd own their own African tantalum mine.

    4. Re:Awesome by TheThiefMaster · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Did you forget that AMD was selling Athlon XP and Athlon MP chips at wildly different prices, even though you could enable MP on the Athlon XP by drawing on them with a pencil?

      Done that. It ups the heat output of the chip from "lots" to "ow my fingerprints"...

      I suspect that the chips actually sold as MP were from the higher-end binnings so that they produced less heat (the same bins that the highest performance and the laptop versions of the chips also come from). The "midrange" chips often can't be clocked to the same speed as the top-end chips, because they are physically inferior.

      Incidentally the Athlon XP-M chips used less power and put out less heat than the normal ones, and oddly were left with MP enabled. Unfortunately unless you have an MP board capable of manually altering the CPU multiplier (mine didn't) or you cut a bunch of traces on the chip, they'll only run at 4x the fsb (600MHz in my case). Seeing how things freak out when you have one 2GHz cpu and one 600MHz cpu in SMP was interesting though.

  2. double rainbows by __aatirs3925 · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm kinda excited for whatever this means. Could somebody please explain? Does this mean Atom processors might be useful now?

    1. Re:double rainbows by Neil+Boekend · · Score: 5, Informative

      It means that intel has thrown an FPGA into a normal CPU. FPGA's are highly programmable chips that are very fast in the thing they are programmed for. Changing the programming takes, by comparison, a lot of time and they usually can't do anything else than what they are programmed for.

      If you would program one to be a decryption device you could have very fast decryption, but you can't let it do something else when there is nothing to decrypt (multitask).

      All in all the result will be a major increase for applications that are reprogrammed to be in the FPGA (and are small enough for the FPGA) but nothing will change for the other applications.

      There are many other chances and limitations, as it is a completely different device, but these are the most important (as far as I know) in this case.

      --
      Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
    2. Re:double rainbows by Kjella · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If there was a mass market, you'd make an ASIC. This lets embedded developers create special circuitry for whatever embedded need they have, which is useful but I don't see it as a mass market product for regular consumers.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    3. Re:double rainbows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Essentially this means that there is a chunk of the processor which will be *COMPLETELY* configurable. FPGA stands for "field programmable gate array" which just implies that you can re-program the way those gates are connected *after* the chip has been manufactured.

      Without understanding basic electrical engineering logic it's hard to describe all the neato things you can do with this, but essentially FPGAs can do all sorts of neat things and they can do them in parallel. If you've ever heard of something being "cheap in hardware but expensive in software" that's exactly what an FPGA can solve.

      Something like this (assuming the FPGA had enough gates) might allow you to implement the HDCP decoder in "software", and decode the bitstream in realtime. This would be neat!

    4. Re:double rainbows by ThermalRunaway · · Score: 3, Informative

      FPGAs are useful as the actual digital circuits are re programmable. So you could theoretically patch your CPU and change the physical functionality of at least part of it. This would lead to all sorts of nice customizations.

      One interesting aspect of the Altera soft CPU (NIOS), is that you can add custom HW directly into the execution unit, basically making your own HW instructions. Then you can generate an assembly instruction for it and use it right from your code. This lets you do nifty things like build a custom piece of HW to implement some arcane computation that is specific to your particular use of the HW and have it built right into the CPU. Wonder if there is this sort of setup here.. that would be pretty nice.

      www.altera.com/literature/ug/ug_nios2_custom_instruction.pdf

    5. Re:double rainbows by ThermalRunaway · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I know.. I've simply giving an example of an interesting way Altera lets you customize some of their IP. The Atom has an Intel core and an Altera FPGA... im doing some wishful thinking that maybe you would get some level of access to the CPU like you do with the NIOS.

    6. Re:double rainbows by Macman408 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Probably not for anything you'd be interested in. Unless of course, you're interested in a slow CPU with slow (but custom) logic. If you want fast custom logic, or ridiculously low-power, you go with an ASIC (assuming you have either high volume, or can tolerate a high per-unit price). If you don't have a rather complex, repetitive calculation to do, you go with a regular CPU. If you do have a big calculation, you might consider a faster CPU or GPU, or at least something with a faster connection between the FPGA and CPU. If your calculation isn't particularly complex (eg something simple like adding two numbers), a CPU will already be faster and lower-power, assuming it has an instruction (or several) that implements the function you need.

      In the end, Intel has just managed to invent yet another piece of hardware for which there is no good programming model. It's been how many years, and there is STILL no killer model for programming multiple core machines? Yes, there are many ways, but each has pretty significant disadvantages, and the vast majority of applications that people use see very minimal benefit from multiple cores (often because there's no great way to program for them without investing significant effort, see previous sentence).

      This will be interesting for small embedded systems designers, who can come up with nifty ways to use the hardware, don't have large volumes, and can charge high prices since their customers have low-volume very specific needs. The rest of us will ignore it, forget it, and not shed a tear when Intel quietly discontinues the product.

    7. Re:double rainbows by Morty · · Score: 2, Informative

      Some vendors, such as Juniper, have transitioned at least some of their product lines from ASICs to FPGAs. A problem with ASICs is that you can't patch them for security issues. This is bad if, say, you sell firewall products.

    8. Re:double rainbows by allaunjsilverfox2 · · Score: 2, Funny

      And REALLY piss off intel at the same time. Using Intel chips to decode hdcp would be pretty ironic. I mean, Can you imagine using the FPGA to do the grunt work of decoding and then using the cpu to re encode the stream?

      --
      Restore the madness of youth's lechery
    9. Re:double rainbows by DrSkwid · · Score: 2, Informative

      No, Transmeta Chips did on-the-fly binary translation.

      And it turned out to not be a selling point.

      --
      There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  3. Achronix FPGA's fabbed by Intel by allanw · · Score: 4, Informative

    In related news, and also very interesting: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210263/Intel-to-fab-FPGAs-for-startup-Achronix

  4. more jobs for me by fpgaprogrammer · · Score: 4, Funny

    yay!

    1. Re:more jobs for me by SuricouRaven · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You need an EE master. FPGA programming is *hard*.

  5. Actual information by Mysteray · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://edc.intel.com/Link.aspx?id=3961

    350 user I/O pins. I think that could control a few Christmas lights. Or make a nifty message-passing bus for a parallel computer.

    Wonder if anyone will make inexpensive boards with breakout IO?

    1. Re:Actual information by allanw · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Only PCI-E 1x interconnect between the CPU and FPGA? Kinda disappointing.

  6. Only certain Virtex-2Pro/4/5s have PowerPC cores by Jan · · Score: 4, Informative

    Many Virtex-II Pro, Virtex-4, and Virtex-5 don't have PowerPC cores. No Virtex-6 or later device does.

  7. Re:Don't know if this is a first by the_other_chewey · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This announcement is somewhat different, though, in that it seems they have integrated an FPGA fabric on a traditional CPU die.

    No they haven't - it's two chips in one package.

  8. In particular... by Jan · · Score: 5, Informative

    Altera used to have FPGAs with an embedded ARM core + support "stripe" (Excalibur, early 2000s) -- e.g. Altera Excalibur EPXA10.

    Of course Xilinx has announced a family of 7 series FPGAs with ARM Cortex-A9MPCore cores. http://www.xilinx.com/technology/roadmap/processing-platform.htm

    Both Xilinx and Altera also have in-house soft-processor cores and infrastructure, and ecosystems of third-party soft processor cores.

  9. Re:FPGA users already don't care by AuMatar · · Score: 4, Informative

    FPGAs aren't all that cheap either. They're about rapid development, and are cheaper than an ASIC for small to medium lots. Large scale ASICs win out on cost per unit being really low.

    --
    I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
  10. Reading the Intel E6x5C Platform Brief... by Jan · · Score: 5, Informative

    Before you all speculate widely, try reviewing the actual product brief. http://download.intel.com/embedded/processors/prodbrief/324535.pdf . In which you will see this is an MCM with an Atom E6xx SoC die and an Altera FPGA die, interconnected by 1-2 PCIe x1 links. It has an amazing 1466 ball grid array package.

    It's not clear to me what this level of packaging and integration achieves compared to mounting a (not integrated) E6xx BGA and a separate Altera or Xilinx FPGA BGA onto the main PCB, interconnected by PCIe x1 or perhaps even x4. Then you would get a broader choice of FPGAs -- and perhaps a simpler PCB escape for the two packages compared to one 1466 ball beast.

    The advantages of this MCM as stated in the brief include:
    * reduced board footprint
    * lower component count
    * simplified inventory control / manufacturing
    * single-vendor support

    True, but forgive me if I'm not over the moon. The dream of integrated FPGA fabric into a heterogeneous SoC (same die) includes a very low latency and possibly cache coherent interconect between the processor(s) and the FPGA. But here the FPGA is on the other side of a narrow PCIe link. It can't share the Atom SoC's memory hierarchy / DRAM channels very effectively. It is probably a very long latency round trip from x86 software control / registers and L1$ data, to some registers or function units in the FPGA, and back to the x86. So I think of this as more of a super-flexible Atom SoC platform than a dream reconfigurable computing platform.

    It's a nice step but I look forward to so much more.

    http://www.fpgacpu.org/usenet/fpgas_as_pc_coprocessors.html (1996): "... So as long as FPGAs are attached on relatively glacially slow I/O buses
    -- including 32-bit 33 MHz PCI -- it seems unlikely they will be of much use in general purpose PC processor acceleration. ..."

  11. It's been done, it's being done. by Jan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Done: Altera Excalibur EPXA10
    In progress: http://www.xilinx.com/technology/roadmap/processing-platform.htm

  12. Re:Put an ARM in the FPGA by Arlet · · Score: 4, Informative

    The advantage of the ARM business model is that you don't have to. Anybody can get a license from ARM to put a core in an ASIC. This means that is very easy to build an integrated system on a chip around a CPU and any kind of peripherals you want.

    This is Intel's attempt to capture some of that market. But because they don't want to license their core, their trying to tie it to an FPGA. I have doubts whether this will be attractive. FPGAs are slow, use more power, and are more expensive compared to ASICs. For high-volume products they can't compete on price, and for high-performance products they can't compete on speed.

  13. FPGA-based robot controllers by G3ckoG33k · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Articles (found freely on Google) like "Evolving FPGA-based robot controllers using an evolutionary algorithm." by Renato A. Krohling, Yuchao Zhou, and Andy M. Tyrrell is a dream!!!

    Genetic algorithms and FPGA is way cool!

  14. Re:FPGA users already don't care by leuk_he · · Score: 2, Insightful

    THis might be the weak point. Suppliers cannot change to a ASIC in a later phase, unless intel licenses the atom cpu. (right....). The biggest advantage of atom is de x86 development tools and applications (windows). The Quick to Market is a big win there. However to optimize power/price in a later phase is not possible.

  15. Re:Only certain Virtex-2Pro/4/5s have PowerPC core by squizzar · · Score: 2, Funny

    Shush AC, there there, don't let the scary electronics frighten you...

  16. Re:FPGA users already don't care by fpgaprogrammer · · Score: 2, Informative

    There are very cheap FPGAs too! Actel igloo nano are even under $1. These are often used as glue logic or nano-controllers like to connect a USB port to an ADC and DAC. In many cases, low cost ($1-20) FPGAs are use instead of microcontrollers and often FPGAs are even being programmed with microprocessor cores like the Nios(altera) or Microblaze (xilinx) or even soft ARM cores. You can run Linux on them!

  17. Hardly a unique product, apart from x86 by hattig · · Score: 2, Informative

    There are loads of FPGAs on the market with integrated PowerPC cores. There are probably FPGAs on the market with integrated ARM cores (ah yes, a post already links to one such creation). This is a dual-die package with a 60k gate FPGA. It's a nice option on the market, but it's hardly unique. The cost will be a major issue as well, although so far the prices look reasonable. But you can't put much into 60,000 gates (although maybe they're counted different from Xilinx or Spartan gates), certainly not a Minimig AGA core.

    So enjoy your 600MHz Atom + FPGA. Or 1GHz. Or 1.3GHz. WIth enough FPGA to implement a C64. Yeah, I know that in industry it will be used for different purposes, but will that industry care about x86 compatibility ... or continue using the existing PowerPC and ARM options?

  18. Re:Only certain Virtex-2Pro/4/5s have PowerPC core by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 2, Informative

    Xilinx Extensible Processing Platform parts are supposedly manufactured, and planned for sale in early 2011. I've been hearing about their progress for over a year from a friend who's a top Xilinx engineer.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  19. Good example by SuperKendall · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It would let viruses create some custom FPGA code that would be able to crack any encrypted files you had in mere seconds, instead of hours.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  20. Re:Only certain Virtex-2Pro/4/5s have PowerPC core by Bassman59 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The largest I have seen has two PowerPC 440 cores. That would be the Virtex-5 FX130T and FX200T (Only different in the number of logic gates available).

    None of the current V6s do, but I keep hearing about Xilinx going to ARM. It is in one of their roadmap documents but no real info on exactly where in the roadmap it is.

    Unlike Intel's solution, the Xilinx units have everything on a single silicon die.

    And my God, the tools SUCK.