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Comment by errantspark | Hacker News Reader

Wait sorry back up a bit here. I can buy a laptop that has a daughter FPGA in it? Does it have GPIO??? Are we seriously building hardware worth buying again in 2024? Do you have a link?

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It isn't as fun as you think - they are setup for specific use cases and quite small. Here's a link to the software page: https://ryzenai.docs.amd.com/en/latest/index.html

The teeny-tiny "NPU," which is actually an FPGA, is 10 TOPS.

Edit: I've been corrected, not an FPGA, just an IP block from Xilinx.

It's not a FPGA. It's an NPU IP block from the Xilinx side of the company. It was presumably originally developed to be run on a Xilinx FPGA, but that doesn't mean AMD did the stupid thing and actually fabbed a FPGA fabric instead of properly synthesizing the design for their laptop ASIC. Xilinx involvement does not automatically mean it's an FPGA.

Thanks for the correction, edited.

Do you have any more reading on this? How come the XDNA drivers depend on Xilinx' XRT runtime?

because XRT has a plugin architecture: XRT<-shim plugin<-kernel driver. The shims register themselves with XRT. The XDNA driver repo houses both the shim and the kernel driver.

Thanks, that makes sense.

It would be surprising and strange if AMD didn't reuse the software framework they've already built for doing AI when that IP block is instantiated on an FPGA fabric rather than hardened in an ASIC.

Well, I'm irrationally disappointed, but thanks. Appreciate the correction.

Yes, the one on the ryzen 7000 chips like the 7840u isn't massive, but that's the last gen model. The one they've just released with the HX370 chip is estimated at 50 TOPS, which is better than Qualcomm's ARM flagship that this post is about. It's a fivefold improvement in a single generation, it's pretty exciting.

A̵n̵d̵ ̵i̵t̵'̵s̵ ̵a̵n̵ ̵F̵P̵G̵A̵ It's not an FPGA

> And it's an FPGA.

nope it's not.

I've just ordered myself a jump to conclusions mat.

Lol during grad school my advisor would frequently cut me off and try to jump to a conclusion, while I was explaining something technical often enough he was wrong. So I did really buy him one (off eBay or something). He wasn't pleased.

If you want GPIOs, you don't need (or want) an FPGA.

I don't know the details of your use case, but I work with low level hardware driven by GPIOs and after a bit of investigation, concluded that having direect GPIO access in a modern PC was not necessary or desirable compared to the alternatives.

I get a lot of use out of the PRUs on the BeagleboneBlack, I would absolutely get use out of an FPGA in a laptop.

It makes more sense to me to just use the BeagleboneBlack in concert with the FPGA. Unless you have highly specific compute or data movement needs that can't be satisfied over a USB serial link. If you have those needs, and you need a laptop, I guess an FPGA makes sense but that's a teeny market.

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