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Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

AMD XDNA – Versal AI Core / 2nd-gen AIE-ML tiles

Are these programmable by the end-user? The "software programmability" section describes "Vitis AI" frameworks supported. But can we write our own software on these?

Is this card FPGA-based?

EDIT: [1] more info on the AI-engine tiles: scalar cores + "adaptable hardware (FPGA?)" + {AI+DSP}.

[1] https://www.xilinx.com/products/technology/ai-engine.html

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It's very likely FPGA-based; Xilinx is an FPGA company. This is being pitched as an "AI accelerator", but "Alveo" as a product line existed before AMD's acquisition of Xilinx, and other "Alveo" products exist (https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/alveo.html) that are marketed for other purposes, while really just being Xilinx FPGAs pre-programmed to perform specific other tasks, with some domain-specific DSPs + interconnects around the edges.

It's possible that AMD could have reworked an existing Xilinx design to incorporate RDNA chiplets in place of some of the FPGA-gate-grid chiplets, creating a heterogeneous mesh; but I find it just as likely that AMD just took their VLSI for an RDNA core and loaded it onto the existing FPGA.

It's not a traditional FPGA chip (lots of luts and flip flops). The "AI Engine" is basically hardened chiplets that are working alongside soft logic chiplets and I/O. This is how they're able to get their performance/power numbers

I suspect that it still has some fpga fabric attacched to the ai engines. The two parts are separate, but according to Xilinx docs (talking about Versal Soc), they are supposed to work togheter

Interesting. It seems then that the xdna architecture in the Ryzen 4070 is nothing more than a port of the existing Xilinx Versal cores (fpga+ai engine)

That's what AMD said.

Says RDNA based which is AMD's GPU tech.

No, it says XDNA.

My mind accidentally translated that wrong. Thanks!

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