Intel/Altera brings FPGA to Xeon Broadwell chip

[miguelvp]

Info about Altera Arria 10 GX with a 15 core Broadwell EP:

http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/03/14/intel-marrying-fpga-beefy-broadwell-open-compute-future/

I knew it was coming, OpenCL and Deep Learning neural nets just got a bit more interesting and relevant to everyday computing.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/rumor-intel-looking-to-buy-altera/msg832401/#msg832401

Now to wait a full year

[miguelvp]

F*ck. I just spent $$$$ on an E5 2696 v3 (eqv. 2699 v3) .

It's ok, nothing to get your hands on until 2017 unless you have connections

Edit: Plus it's an Arria 10 based one so I bet it won't be cheap nor affordable.

[Kilrah]

Yup - pretty sure that's gonna be small quantities of a $5-10k chip that are going to be reserved for research projects to spend a few years actually developing tools to make use of it before variants get to be more generally available...

Very interesting though, will be a potential powerhouse for the right applications.

[miguelvp]

Yup - pretty sure that's gonna be small quantities of a $5-10k chip that are going to be reserved for research projects to spend a few years actually developing tools to make use of it before variants get to be more generally available...

Very interesting though, will be a potential powerhouse for the right applications.

Data centers like Google, Amazon, Microsoft Azure and Bing, etc will be the first to benefit in terms of performance/power consumption. They are all already doing this with external FPGA boards for the last two years.

If (not much of an if, but when) they get adopted on those data centers it will bring the cost down, so we do have the Cloud to thank for this to become more mainstream.

Edit: Altera has had OpenCL toolchains available for their high end FPGAs for a couple of years as well.
Edit2: Correction, it has been four and a half years since they announced it:
https://www.altera.com/about/news_room/releases/_2011/products/nr-opencl.tablet.html
So my bet is that they are going to hit the floor running.

[RGB255_0_0]

A shame for us on X99 hoping Intel would take IRIS onto the platform but remove the graphics capabilities and keep the performance provided by the EDRAM.