Intel Atom + FPGA

[stephen.craven@gmail.com]

All,

I apologize if this is a repost, but I saw this today and thought it
relevant to the group:

http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/11/22/intel-launches-fpga-equipped-atom/

"Intel is quite clearly serious about offering competition to ARM in
the embedded market, and has just announced a new Atom processor
series that offers a unique selling point: an integral FPGA."

The FPGA is from Altera.

Stephen

 

[rickman]

On Nov 23, 11:23 am, "stephen.cra...@gmail.com"
<stephen.cra...@gmail.com> wrote:

All,

I apologize if this is a repost, but I saw this today and thought it
relevant to the group:

http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/11/22/intel-launches-fpga-equipped-atom/

"Intel is quite clearly serious about offering competition to ARM in
the embedded market, and has just announced a new Atom processor
series that offers a unique selling point: an integral FPGA."

The FPGA is from Altera.

Stephen

I have seen this, I don't recall if it was posted here or not.

It looks like Intel has realized that their CPUs can be much more
interesting if the peripheral I/O is made more flexible. I have been
expecting to see embedded CPUs combined with FPGAs for some time, but
I thought it would be driven by the FPGA companies. Now I see that
this is less likely because of a combination of their mindset (too
many variants to be practical in marketing terms) and their perceived
market (most of the money is in big chips to big customers). Of
course that is ignoring the products from Cypress and Actel (now
Microsemi), but they are still just getting out of the gate.

I have been noticing for some time that Moore's law is providing
transistors and gates that we don't really need. x86 CPUs can no
longer make use of the transistors to speed up the processors. So
instead they have started to multiply the number of processors without
a good way to utilize them. FPGAs are starting to reach the point of
being more than enough LUTs and registers for nearly all designs at
reasonable prices. The logical next step is more system integration.

So Intel has seen the marketing advantage of providing a powerful CPU
with user customizable I/O or specialized supplementary processing.
They also see the market for low power processing. I think in another
five years the market will have turned so that low power will dominate
nearly all CPU and FPGA apps... and I don't mean FPGAs which only use
half a watt. I mean devices like the Silicon Blue chips with near
zero static current and low per-MHz power.

More and more things are becoming hand held and portable. How much
longer will people continue to use boat anchor electronics when they
can take it all with them?

BTW, if you want to see a possible direction low power may be taking,
check out the Green Arrays 144 processor chip. Low power is what it
is all about! In fact, that may be the next big thing, Field
Programmable Processor Arrays, FPPAs!

Rick

 

[Gabor]

On Nov 23, 11:39 am, rickman <gnu...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Nov 23, 11:23 am, "stephen.cra...@gmail.com"

stephen.cra...@gmail.com> wrote:
All,

I apologize if this is a repost, but I saw this today and thought it
relevant to the group:

http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/11/22/intel-launches-fpga-equipped-atom/

"Intel is quite clearly serious about offering competition to ARM in
the embedded market, and has just announced a new Atom processor
series that offers a unique selling point: an integral FPGA."

The FPGA is from Altera.

Stephen

I have seen this, I don't recall if it was posted here or not.

It looks like Intel has realized that their CPUs can be much more
interesting if the peripheral I/O is made more flexible.  I have been
expecting to see embedded CPUs combined with FPGAs for some time, but
I thought it would be driven by the FPGA companies.  Now I see that
this is less likely because of a combination of their mindset (too
many variants to be practical in marketing terms) and their perceived
market (most of the money is in big chips to big customers).  Of
course that is ignoring the products from Cypress and Actel (now
Microsemi), but they are still just getting out of the gate.

I have been noticing for some time that Moore's law is providing
transistors and gates that we don't really need.  x86 CPUs can no
longer make use of the transistors to speed up the processors.  So
instead they have started to multiply the number of processors without
a good way to utilize them.  FPGAs are starting to reach the point of
being more than enough LUTs and registers for nearly all designs at
reasonable prices.  The logical next step is more system integration.

So Intel has seen the marketing advantage of providing a powerful CPU
with user customizable I/O or specialized supplementary processing.
They also see the market for low power processing.  I think in another
five years the market will have turned so that low power will dominate
nearly all CPU and FPGA apps... and I don't mean FPGAs which only use
half a watt.  I mean devices like the Silicon Blue chips with near
zero static current and low per-MHz power.

More and more things are becoming hand held and portable.  How much
longer will people continue to use boat anchor electronics when they
can take it all with them?

BTW, if you want to see a possible direction low power may be taking,
check out the Green Arrays 144 processor chip.  Low power is what it
is all about!  In fact, that may be the next big thing, Field
Programmable Processor Arrays, FPPAs!

Rick

Mathstar has been there. Google for FPOA (field programmable object
array)
which has arrays of tiny sequencers spattered with multipliers. By
the way
there is an article on the new Intel Atom w/ FPGA. It's just a re-
packaging
with an Altera FPGA on board. Check out the article in Embedded
Technology
Journal.

http://www.techfocusmedia.net/index.php/embeddedtechnologyjournal/

-- Gabor

 

[Prevailing over Technolog]

On Nov 23, 8:23 am, "stephen.cra...@gmail.com"
<stephen.cra...@gmail.com> wrote:

All,

I apologize if this is a repost, but I saw this today and thought it
relevant to the group:

http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/11/22/intel-launches-fpga-equipped-atom/

"Intel is quite clearly serious about offering competition to ARM in
the embedded market, and has just announced a new Atom processor
series that offers a unique selling point: an integral FPGA."

The FPGA is from Altera.

Stephen

The "Embedded Technology Journal" has a good article on the Stellarton
combo, discussing the advantages and disadvantages. The section on
how the CPU communicates to the FPGA is particularly interesting.
http://www.techfocusmedia.net/embeddedtechnologyjournal/feature_articles/20101123-stellarton

According to the article, the FPGA in the package is an Altera Aria II
GX FPGA "with about 55,000 logic elements." Looking at the Altera
product table, I see a device with 45,000 equivalent logic elements
(LEs) and one with 63,000. The FPGA is likely one of these two or
Altera is planning another intermediate device.
http://www.altera.com/products/devices/arria-fpgas/arria-ii-gx/overview/aiigx-overview.html

The Altera presentation on Quartus II shows a roadmap with the Intel
Stellarton along with support for NIOS II, MIPS, ARM Cortex-M1, and
ARM Cortex-A9.
http://www.altera.com/b/embedded-fpga-design-flow.html

eweek Linux Devices also had a good story on the combo and Altera's
processor roadmap or their "embedded initiative."
http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Altera-embedded-initiative/