Question on FPGA

Does Xilinx have any multicore FPGA ?

Reply to
Jatin Bhateja
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Jatin,

Xilinx can actually claim it had "multi-core" before Intel coined the phrase: The first Virtex II Pro family had devices with two IBM 405PPC processors in them (winter, 2004).

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In fact, the largest device was designed to have four processors, but no one seemed interested in buying a FPGA with four IBM 405PPC's in it then (it wasn't popular, yet).

Part of Erich Goetting's legacy may be that he saw multi-core as a solution three years before anyone (in 2001) in addition to all of his many accomplishments.

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(see 1980 graduates)

And, today, Virtex 4 FX series has devices with two 405PPC cores, as well.

For Virtex 5 FX, that announcement will be made soon, but you can probably assume there will continue to be at least two PPC cores in the larger parts in the FX line.

Perhaps in future, we may even have more than 2.

As well, today, one can place many (as in perhaps dozens) of MicroBlaze(tm) soft processors in our larger parts. Researchers have been using our parts to investigate the issues of "multi-core" again long before Intel and AMD made it so popular.

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At a talk given at SELSE II by an Intel Scientist on "multi-core" where he concludes Intel's future may have 288 cores beyond 22nm, one attendee stood up and asked (it wasn't me, by the way) "sounds like you are describing a course-grain FPGA!" The Intel scientist was incensed, and reacted quite emotionally, as he felt it was an insult to be compared to a lowly and inferior technology "FPGA"!

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see slide 15.

Of course, he completely ignores the communication between cores, and left it as an "exercise for the student" not worthy of his brilliance and attention.

Not to mention there are no tools and no languages that allows multiple processors to all work at the same time (unless you count VHDL and verilog, which FPGAs use already).

So, Xilinx has "been there, done that" and supports any and all efforts to make programming massively parallel structures more efficient (as we are the premier vendor of massively parallel programmable devices today).

Austin

Reply to
austin

I think that the many people doing parallel processing since the Transputer days would argue that there are many "tools and languages that allow multiple processors to all work at the same time", although you might have to look very hard to find these running in a PC...

Here's one I worked on back in the 1980's:

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Reply to
Gabor

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