Intel axes older FPGA cards, moves development into hands of customers

Intel is discontinuing its original lineup of Programmable Acceleration Cards as it turns to an "ecosystem first" strategy that helps customers create their own FPGA-based products, including SmartNICs. The chipmaker issued an end-of-life notice Wednesday for three products in its FPGA-powered Programmable Acceleration Card …

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooh are any of these like, particularly tasty in a GFLOP/$ measure? If they do what they're told and there's an open toolchain to get from C code to it generating correct flops turning input streams into output streams then a huge array of them could be super fast and fun :D

[Anonymous Coward]

For single precision, GFlops/$ is/was "middling" if you look at standard fare like matrix multiplication.

Where FPGAs get interesting is acceleration of math & stats functions via table lookups in hardware, and algorithms that have a natural expression in dataflow form - .e.g Monte Carlo simulations.

Personally I'm looking forward to experimenting with the Agilex devices (should be about 4x the Arria 10 performance) and especially the big ones that have just been announced.

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[Pascal Monett]

Baidu ? BAIDU ?

Baidu is still purchasing Intel technology ?

Somebody alert the White House !

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Baidu ? BAIDU ?

That was a flashback. I don't see their name often anymore and the last time I saw their name frequently, it was probably in a virus scanner ~14 years ago.

For those too young to know, 1 of the products tied to this company was a "banner toolbar" way back in the Internet Explorer 4/5/5.5 days. Their software stuck around even for a decent while after those days, but it was by then a all-out hijacker. A long time ago I read a very lengthy article about the dude that made the original banner and believe it or not, he was crafty and in a very real way trailblazed the path Google would eventually take (data gathering, spying, etc.). While I have no proof, realistically, Google might of been directly inspired by him... no joke.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Baidu ? BAIDU ?

Just to follow up my Google claim, I just found this on wikipedia in reference to "RankDex" (what the toolbar used):

"It predated the similar PageRank algorithm used by Google two years later in 1998;[23] Google founder Larry Page referenced Li's work as a citation in some of his U.S. patents for PageRank."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu#History

Note: the page doesn't mention the IE toolbar, but it existed (at least somewhere between the years 1998 - 2000).