If you felt a Disturbance in the Force or some other shift in our reality continuum early last week, it was probably caused by announcements from
Xilinx and
Altera offering FPGA development kits that plug into Intel’s Front-Side Bus (FSB). I’m not talking about peripheral devices or bus bridges, but small boards that sit directly in the socket normally occupied by a Xenon chip -- something that goes radically against Intel’s strongly-held policy of keeping the FSB strictly off-limits to non-Intel silicon. The mind boggles at the possibilities this opens up.
In his
coverage of the Xilinx FSB kit for
The Enquirer, Charlie Demerjian reports that it takes only 10% of a mid-range Virtex 5 device to implement the FSB interface, leaving the rest of the chip available for (in his words)
user mischief. According to the Xilinx release, the 20 W device is intended as a stand-in for one of Intel’s 100+W CPUs in high-end multi-processor systems to be used as an accelerator in specialized industrial, medical, and scientific applications, but I think that that’s only half the story.
I agree with Mr Demerjian’s analysis that the Intel move to open up their FSP is, at least in part due to feeling some real competition from the AMD Torrenza initiative (
announced June 2006) to encourage the development of application-specific co-processors. I’d also speculate that Intel felt the tremors of the open architecture revolution that’s been going on in software-land for the past decade. It would seem that this confluence between basic engineering wisdom and the Intel
Only the Paranoid Survive philosophy may be challenging the semi-closed architectures and other brute-force tactics that Intel traditionally used to dominate the market.
Does this mean we’ll be seeing a kinder, gentler Intel? Hardly likely, but an open FSB and the FPGA-based tools to exploit it does mean we’ll be seeing their processors popping up in lots of kinky, and potentially lucrative, applications. In opening its kimono in such a dramatic way, Intel is taking a big risk, but I think the rewards will be much greater as entirely new families of products grow up around the processor sockets they’ve made available.
When I sat back and digested the news, visions of lower-cost medical imaging systems and security appliances (
Tarari,
Sensory Networks, are you paying attention?) danced through my head. One of my smarter, more tech savvy buddies who works for a well-known graphics chip maker had even more interesting ideas. He speculated that such a tight coupling of processor and FPGA could encourage lots of innovations in video encoding/transcoding products, hardware spam filtering and new approaches to communications controllers for high-speed wireless networks. He also pointed out that attaching an analog front-end and a fast ADC on the front end of the FPGA would let you turn a PC into a nice piece of high-performance multi-function test equipment. How about a 1 GHz digital oscilloscope/spectrum analyzer/TDR for under $2 k?
Of course, when two geeks get together the conversation eventually turns silly. When we ran out of practical ideas, we speculated on how an FPGA-enhanced server box would make a dandy
SETI@Home accelerator or a low-cost vector processor to let amateur computational fluid dynamics enthusiasts model the performance of transonic vehicles, or do their own weather prediction. He also argued that the FPGA ocean of gates could be used as an
anti-virtualization tool to re-instantiate and accelerate hardware functions like modems and codecs that had been absorbed by PC software over the years. Taking the idea further, he suggested that there would be a small but thriving market for synthesizing a 4 GHz, multi-core
MC68000 and a PCI bridge to create the world's fastest
Commodore Amiga.
You can imagine my amusement when I discovered that there is already a move
afoot to revive the Amiga brand with a pair of PowerPC-powered devices slated to debut late this year. I guess my buddy is not so crazy after all…
Comments? Questions? More interesting ideas for hacking Intel’s FSB?
Write me at: lhg at en-genius.net.
