
Virtex UltraScale+ FPGA Augmented with Co-Packaged – Community Forums - rbanffy
https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Virtex-UltraScale-FPGA-augmented-with-co-packaged-HBM-DRAM/ba-p/827308
======
throwawaybbqed
This post is sort of timely for me to rant and share with the HN community.
I'm a hobbyist with FPGAs .. been fooling around with Altera parts for over a
year. I finally got my first Xilinx part and wow .. at least a part of the
company doesn't seem to give a shit. The part I got was a spartan 6 on a
Papilio Pro board. The Papilio community are awesome but shame on Xilinx. They
provide the Win 10 version of ISE Design Studio inside a freakin VM!!! I
couldn't believe it when I saw it. Whoever green lit this has just stopped
caring IMHO. I wasted 3 hours of my life getting a hello world style program
to run. Imagine running a linux vm inside a Windows 10 box to work with an
embedded device :( :( If this is how Xilinx treats old parts, I'm staying with
Altera parts in the future. Personal opinions yada yada.

~~~
slededit
Xilinx doesn't want you developing new designs with the 6 series. The VM is
really only for people updating old designs. Get a 7 series or later part with
Vivado and your life will be significantly better. Having used both Vivado
really is a lot more efficient.

------
anfilt
I wish the Ultra-scale devices did not cost an Arm and a Leg. Although, I only
personally have a couple designs that could come close to using the amount
logic they provide.

Although, 8GB of HBM could do some nice things. Also the UltraScale+ plus are
one of thew few FPGAs capable of 1 GHz sequential logic for quite a few
designs. So you could probably get a lot of performance for some signal
processing or compute.

~~~
borramakot
F1's on AWS are I think ultrascale+, though I don't know how fast Amazon
actually lets you drive them.

~~~
aseipp
There are a few different available clocks, each in different configurations
(you always get a _set_ of clocks, really), but you can get up to a 500Mhz
clock out of them for specific clock lines from a specific configuration, with
that particular configuration backed by a 250mhz "main" clock as well.

~~~
slededit
Do they let you use the clock management tiles or are they all tied up? With
those you should be able to generate whatever clock you want.

~~~
aseipp
No, at least not directly with the way the HDK is set up out of the box; there
are "Clock Recipes" you choose from at build time, and a recipe is just the
pre-canned configuration. 3 different groups, each one with a chosen (single)
recipe, each group giving you a few clocks of various frequencies.

The clock recipe is examined as part of the "AFI Manifest" when Amazon creates
FPGA images you can load, so I doubt you can go out of the way very much,
here.

[https://github.com/aws/aws-
fpga/blob/master/hdk/docs/clock_r...](https://github.com/aws/aws-
fpga/blob/master/hdk/docs/clock_recipes.csv)

[https://github.com/aws/aws-
fpga/blob/83c80efd30862d862ea8f99...](https://github.com/aws/aws-
fpga/blob/83c80efd30862d862ea8f99ff4045a22d57e3453/hdk/docs/AFI_Manifest.md#L41)

------
unwind
Mods: please fix the severely broken title, thanks.

Also: that looks scary! Didn't see a price, is $nnnn enough? Whoa.

~~~
neurotech1
$nnnnnn Probably north of $100k each unless Xilinx discounts them for high
volume purchases.

~~~
sargun
Yeah, as far as I can tell, on a lot of these products volume discounts can
easily be in the 95%+ range.

------
inamberclad
They mention that the applications are in high performance compute - so what
could one do with an extremely powerful FPGA in a server?

~~~
baseethrowaway
Accelerate the most demanding tasks of your server's workload. Crypto,
audio/video encoding, compression, database lookups, neural network training,
computational fluid dynamics, numerical mathematics, high frequency trading
etc.

~~~
borramakot
I hear this a lot, but every time I try to implement a specific algorithm (in
crypto, compression, and ML so far), I find that a GPU practically beats the
FPGA on every metric but power, especially total cost. No matter how nicely
the problem seems to map to an FPGA, GPUs start from such high performance
that I can't seem to beat them- the one exception so far being some genomic
algorithms.

Are there any really good papers, projects, or products that show where FPGAs
provide a major commercial benefit over a GPU?

~~~
duskwuff
> Are there any really good papers, projects, or products that show where
> FPGAs provide a major commercial benefit over a GPU?

A couple applications that come to mind:

\- RF, including cellular base station hardware and radar

\- ASIC prototyping

\- Low production run computer hardware, including some RAID controllers

~~~
jdietrich
High-end AV equipment like mixing consoles often use FPGAs alongside or
instead of discrete DSP chips. The application demands sub-millisecond latency
and deterministic performance but is too niche to justify spinning an ASIC.

IMO, those are the main factors that justify FPGA selection - low latency and
hard real-time performance. I understand that military and industrial
designers make extensive use of FPGAs for these reasons; the throughput isn't
necessarily any better than an ordinary processor and the cost is drastically
higher, but you have absolute certainty about latency.

