> nobody really wants FPGA fabric on a CPU.
Not true... Xilinx sells a lot of their Zynq, MPSoC, and RFSoC chips. Though I guess those are more CPU on an FPGA.
Not true... Xilinx sells a lot of their Zynq, MPSoC, and RFSoC chips. Though I guess those are more CPU on an FPGA.
Edit: By the way there is some niche research of the FPGA in core (which don't work if the FPGA is over PCIe). This paper describes a way to rearrange memory using a programmable FPGA-based memory controller to optimize database table accesses: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.14349.pdf
I want multiple FPGAs in the CPU. Replace the PMU with an FPGA, replace the MMU with an FPGA, and by replace I mean augment and extend. Of course an FPGA can't do all the work of fixed blocks.
The ultimate problem is politics inside organizations and the lack of any sort of concrete creative thinking.
That Intel isn't incorporating Altera into IFS and allowing IFS customers to include FPGA fabric into their designs is predictable but both astonishing.
x86 and Altera as library IP only available on IFS would give them another 10 years of runway.
Intel had the same market segmentation and lack of imagination in how they applied Optane. Heck, Optane should have had FPGA fabric in each dimm. It appears that each sub-sku has their own fiefdom and their own P&L that ignores ecosystem effects.
Intel needs to be cleaned out.
If they'd been made a performant (as in, non-x86) low-end CPU, then they wouldn't have lost mobile and be competing with ARM now.
Intel of the past few decades learned the wrong lesson from their history. You can climb the value chain to riches, but once you're at the top you still need to seed the earth for the next generation of profits. And that means cheap entry points and volume.
https://www.theregister.com/2006/06/27/intel_sells_xscale/
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3574013/marvell-exits-t...