Intel Launches Atom CPU With Integrated FPGA

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."

Comments

Awesome

[phantomcircuit]

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

Re:Awesome

[arivanov]

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".

Re:Awesome

[Elbereth]

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.

Re:Awesome

[Man On Pink Corner]

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.

Achronix FPGA's fabbed by Intel

[allanw]

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

more jobs for me

[fpgaprogrammer]

yay!

Re:double rainbows

[Neil Boekend]

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.

Actual information

[Mysteray]

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?

Only certain Virtex-2Pro/4/5s have PowerPC cores

[Jan]

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

In particular...

[Jan]

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.

Re:FPGA users already don't care

[AuMatar]

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.

Reading the Intel E6x5C Platform Brief...

[Jan]

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. ..."

Re:Put an ARM in the FPGA

[Arlet]

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.