AI engines, Arm brains, DSP brawn... Versal is Xilinx's Kitchen Sink Edition FPGA

Xilinx has packed everything but the kitchen sink into its new Versal family of FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays). These are chips that have electronic circuitry you can change on-the-fly as needed, so you can morph their internal logic to suit whatever needs doing. You usually describe how you want your chip to work …

[Anonymous Coward]

"These days, engineers are eying up using FPGAs as specialist accelerators, performing work such as network packet inspection [...]"

We were doing 10mbps Ethernet packet filtering in 1985 using the first Xilinx FPGAs like the XC2064 with their small number of gates. Still have the proof of concept handwired board in my archives. The FPGA allowed different operating modes to be selected at run time by loading different images.

My prototype board was designed as an Ethernet diagnostic tool. To overcome the shortage of gates it made preset counters etc by synthesising each load stream from a collection of image differences representing different logic sections of the FPGA.

The FPGA layout was handcrafted at logic level to maximise the efficiency of gate usage and to meet the design's timing constraints.

[Bronek Kozicki]

Alveo

Judging by the numbers supplied I guess the internal architecture is a departure from the more typical concurrent model based on either vector processing or von Neumann model. Is there an upcoming article on The Next Platform , by any chance ?

[martinusher]

FPGAs have been around for a very long time

For at least 25 years, and before these we had CPLD and PAL devices.

There have always been complex FPGAs out there - Xilinx used to have a part that had a couple of

PowerPC cores in it, for example -- but for many of us the search isn't for the ultimate box of logic, we look for inexpensive, capable, parts that have good software support. Those Xilinx FPGAs were about $1K each, definitely in the prototype/aerospace budget realm. In real life once the part gets into double digits everyone's looking at it critically. That's because FPGAs are used for products that have small to medium production runs. They allow you to create complex products, products that can have bug fixes and enhancements over the lifespan of the product. since the program image can be managed like any other firmware component.

Like the PowerPC its possible to add other hard subsystems into a FPGA if the demand warrants it. These subsystems can be made a lot more compact and so run a lot faster than the same logic implemented on the FPGA.

[DCFusor]

Re: FPGAs have been around for a very long time

Sounds like you've been there and done that, martin. Yup....same here. A long while back.

But it was a rare (military or intel) customer that wanted this kind of performance and could stomach the price as you mention, back in the day.

I think what's going on now (or trying to) is bringing the price point of the part and tools down to the point of getting wider adoption - you see the odd fpga project even on hackaday.

I remember a time when I was priced out of the FPGA world as a consultant - greater than $10k just for the privilege of using the tools to design one into something - but if I got the customer to ask - free. Some MBA somewhere needed a new life if they thought locking out people or making their toolset a profit center was wise.

That's what is changing now...the NRE can still be fierce if you need to get up to speed from zero on the tools, but free versions are out there (clunky but I've seen them work) and the parts are lower than "holy crap, $tupid" now.