News Intel Announces New Programmable Accelerator Card

[Admin]

Intel today announced for D5005 Programmable Acceleration Card with Stratix 10 SX, the second of the portfolio following last year's PAC with the 20nm Arria 10 GX.

Intel Announces New Programmable Accelerator Card : Read more

 

[bit_user]

I used to want a FPGA card, but GPUs are good enough for anything I'd currently want to do.

Plus, I'm the specs tell me this thing must be at least $10k.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

This isnt a new idea.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um-1fAVU1OQ

From virtually 10 years ago

 

[bit_user]

From virtually 10 years ago

What does that have to do with anything?

If you watch the video, it's their Larrabee graphics card (or maybe the generation after), which they cancelled before it ever saw the light of day. It was rumored to have graphics performance that wasn't competitive with existing GPUs of the day, and I suspect it also might've cost too much.

Larrabee (microarchitecture) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

After that, they continued the program without any graphics hardware or connectors, and rebranded it as Xeon Phi.

Xeon Phi - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Last year, they abruptly cancelled Xeon Phi. Xeon Phi was a jack of all trades, but a master of none. After Intel announced their Xe dGPUs, bought Altera and Nervana, and with their mainstream Xeons having up to 28 cores, there was pretty much no niche where Xeon Phi wouldn't be surpassed by other Intel products.

Xilinx - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Nervana Systems - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Larrabee is dead. Its closest descendant is the Xeon Scalable line (originating with Skylake-SP), as it was the first to implement a mesh communications topology and AVX-512, both of which they inherited.

Of any of their existing/former products, the Xe dGPUs will likely most resemble their iGPUs. They killed Larrabee because it wasn't competitive with Nvidia. They're not going to bring it back in the form of Xe or anything else.

Skylake (microarchitecture) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

As the article says, this new compute card is FPGA-based, which are not new (as you said), and unlike any of the above.

Hardware acceleration - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[bit_user]

BTW, Linus is a really good salesman. After watching that video, even I almost wanted one. Except, he doesn't realize that GPUs have long been as programmable as he's saying Larrabee was.

For instance, it's not that existing AMD cards can't do ray tracing, just that it would be too slow to be worthwhile. A lot of graphics is like that - once somebody puts some fixed-function logic to enable a particular feature, it's not practical to use software emulation, since any games written to use the feature are expecting the performance of the fixed-function implementation.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

it would be too slow to be worthwhile

Its too slow to be worthwile on rtx cards too lol.

I mean linus did work for ncix so...

 

[bit_user]

Its too slow to be worthwile on rtx cards too lol.

But I trust you get my point, which is that if a game is (barely) playable with RTX, then imagine the same game at 1/3rd or 1/10th the speed. Definitely unplayable.

So, it's not enough just to be able to implement new features - they need to run at approximately the expected speed, or you still basically can't use them.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Im aware. I have seen people render raytraced images on a graphing calculator before. It took 2 days to complete 1 frame, but possible.

 

[bit_user]

Im aware.

Sorry, if I put too strong a point on that. It's really Linus' effusive praise of that Intel GPU's programmability that I'm reacting to.

I realize you were just having a bit of fun with my example.