AMD crams five compute architectures onto a single board

With the launch of its Embedded+ architecture yesterday, AMD effectively posed the question: Why choose one compute architecture when you can have five? The House of Zen's latest offering pairs a x64 Ryzen processor with a Versal AI Edge system-on-chip via PCIe so that they can be used on a single board in low-power, low- …

[HuBo]

I want one!

Quite cool, for reconfigurable computing, to have the x86 and FPGA in the same SOC (rather than PCIe, USB tether, ...), as seen in this AMD design. One might have hoped though that FPGA setup software, for synthesis and place/route (eg. Vivado, Yosys, ...), could run efficiently on the Versal's Cortex-A72 cores (or even some other ARM chips, eg. Neoverse, Apple M3, ...) but this may (unfortunately) not yet be the case, except under some form of x86 emulation. Reconfigurable computing being the future, this does look like a great platform to experiment with that ...

Also quite nice (IMHO) is the Cologne Chip GateMate FPGA, presented (with slides) at FOSDEM (Feb 3-4, 2024, Brussels) whose architecture enables partial self-reconfiguration (updating chip configuration from the inside, while running in unaffected sectors). This could open the door to designing oneself a reconfigurable RISC-V, for example (without x86 or ARM host) ...

From there, it should be a cinch (if desired) to realize a 3 million toothbrush botnet apocalypse, as masterfully foretold 2 decades ago (eh-eh-eh!)!

[elsergiovolador]

Stretch

Judging by the size of the motherboard, that's stretching the definition of embedded.

That said, it would help AMD if they had published a design of minimum system to get the CPU running.

[Anonymous Coward]

A fun idea; but 5 architectures means 5 lots of vulnerabilities; plus probably some new ones at the interconnect!

[tracker1]

Frankenbeast....

For the geek in me, this is impressive. On a practical side, I'm not sure how well this will work. It feels almost worse than the Intel accelerators in terms of usability and ergonomics.

I'm not sure how one would leverage such a beast in practice. Almost anything you might do would likely leave half the capability sitting idle or be too complex to maintain on the software side.

It does in a way feel like the ultimate developer platform to be able to use these different technologies, but I don't know if it will be good in practice.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Frankenbeast....

Necropost. Commodore 128 owners will be familiar with the lack of use of roughly 2/3rds the system's functionality.

The Z80 was basically redundant unless you booted C/PM, and 128 mode as much of an improvement as it was on the 64, had next to no software.

[PRR]

> ...likely leave half the capability sitting idle...

I think the thinking is: you can get sample code for almost any function, but not always in the CPU-family you had planned. With this mixmaster architecture you can run each code function on the platform it likes, no porting.

> ...or be too complex to maintain on the software side.

Yeah, well, that's not the hardware vendor's problem, eh?