
Intel Launches Stratix 10 TX: Leveraging EMIB with 58G Transceivers - rbanffy
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12477/intel-launches-stratix-10-tx-leveraging-emib-with-58g-transceivers-?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
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dooglius
>Previously these were (and have been called) 56G, but Intel is using the term
58G because it believes that its solution will perform better than other 56G
solutions on the market, enough to call it a 58G device.

G here should mean Gbps, it's a technical description not a marketing term.
Either the transceivers can be configured for 29GHz PAM4, or they can't, I
don't see how there's room for interpretation here.

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kingosticks
Where does anandtech get this from? The Intel press release very clearly
states:

> up to 144 transceiver lanes with serial data rates of 1 to 58 Gbps

And the Altera website agrees:
[https://www.altera.com/solutions/technology/transceiver/over...](https://www.altera.com/solutions/technology/transceiver/overview.html)

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dooglius
Hmm, I wonder if they initially designed it only for 56G but they found that
it worked acceptably well up to 58G after tape-out.

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baybal2
Now, this gets interesting.

FPGA's usefulness as an accelerator in DCs was hugely hampered by IO
bottlenecks. Even PCI-E can be said to be limiting the theoretical peak
throughput of top FPGAs. With more IO being done by physical hardware, this
should offset IO bottleneck somewhat.

I'm still waiting for FPGA on package Xeons that will have raw register to
register linkage connection. They were once announced in 2016, some samples
were shown, but then they went silent.

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throwaway2048
keep in mind that raw speed (in terms of say, ram access or PCI-E access
(which is already faster than this implementation)) is rarely the obsticle
these days, the issue is fetch/rtt latency, especially with trying to
integrate FPGA acceleration into a codebase for offloading some operations,
the penalty for for which can often be tens of thousands of cycles, or more.

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slededit
Seems pretty desperate. It was known they were having a real hard time
bringing up Altera's gigabit transceivers on Intel's processes. I guess
they've given up and decided to just bond separate chips together.

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deepnotderp
Which isn't necessarily a bad solution....

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slededit
Its a lot more expensive so I guess it depends on your definition of "bad".

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make3
I'm a neophyte to this area, but did I read this correctly, the stratix 10 SoC
comes with an ARM cortex chip? Intel sells solutions with ARM chips?

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onion2k
ARM don't make chips. They design them. Then they license the designs to chip
users, who in turn get chip manufacturers to make them. Intel make _lots_ of
ARM chips (as well as their own in-house designs).

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simonh
Intel only recently signed a manufacturing deal with ARM in 2016, I'm not sure
how extensive it is though. I'm only aware of LG taking advantage of it until
now.

Intel used to both design and manufacture their own line of ARM SOCs back in
the 2000s under the XScale brand, but they sold it to Marvell in 2006.

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ncmncm
This article made no sense at all. It could have made sense with a few
strategically placed definitions.

