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Xilinx Announces Project Everest: The 7nm FPGA SoC Hybrid
This week Xilinx is making public its latest internal project for the next era of specialized computing. The new product line, called Project Everest in the interim, is based around what Xilinx is calling an ACAP – an Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform. The idea here is that for both compute and acceleration, particularly in the data center, the hardware has to be as agile as the software. Project Everest will combine Xilinx's highest performing next-generation programmable logic along with application processors, real-time processors, programmable engines, RF, high-speed SerDes, programmable IO, HBM, and a custom network-on-chip. The idea is that space typically devoted to hard blocks in FPGAs (such as memory controllers) are now optimized on chip, leaving more programmable silicon for the compute and adaptability. Project Everest is one of the Three Big Trends as identified by Xilinx's new CEO, Victor Peng.
[...] Xilinx's ACAP portfolio will be initiated with TSMC's 7nm manufacturing process, with the first tapeouts due in late 2018. Xilinx states that Project Everest has been a monumental internal effort, taking 4-5 years and 1500 engineers already, with over $1b in R&D costs. The final big chips are expected to weigh in at 50 billion transistors, with a mix of monolithic and interposer designs based on configurations.
Today's announcement is more of a teaser than anything else – the diagram above is about the limit to which that Xilinx will talk about features and the product portfolio. The value of the ACAP, according to Xilinx, will be its feature set and millisecond-level configurability. For a server on the edge, for example, an ACAP can use both the programmable logic elements for millisecond bitstream reconfiguration of different processes along with the application processors for general logic or the programmable engines as ASIC-level acceleration. This can lead to, among other things, different AI acceleration techniques and 5G RF manageability by multiple containers/VMs on a single ACAP. The overriding idea is that the ACAP can apply dynamic optimization for workloads, with Xilinx citing a 10-100x speedup over CPUs and more use cases than GPUs or ASICs as a fundamental value to the new hardware, built through software and hardware programmability. Xilinx also stated that the RF will have four times the bandwidth of current 16nm radios, leveraging 16x16 800 MHz radios.
Also at The Register and The Next Platform.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 21 2018, @06:15PM (1 child)
No slaveware announcements should be posted on soylentnews.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday March 21 2018, @06:43PM
Feel free to help the world by starting your own Open version of the FPGA tools. While bloated to some extent, the Xilinx tools are a 20GB install to support one family of parts (40G if you take the whole thing). And the next family will not work until you write specific code to target the new hard cores.
It ain't "slaveware", moron. The company provides the tools you need to use the parts they sell. While the tools are far from perfect, nobody else has the time or business case to provide an alternative. If you don't like that, you can try to buy a chip from Intel and an Open version of those tools.