Hell yes! Intel chips are about to get exciting again. SGI put FPGA's on nodes connected to its NUMA interconnect with great results. Intel will likely put it on its network on chip with more bandwidth and integration while pushing latency down further. 90's era tools that automatically partitioned an app between a CPU and FPGA can be revived now once Intel knocks out those obstacles that held them back.<p>Combine that with OSS developments by Clifford Wolf and Synflow in synthesis that can be connected to OSS FPGA tools to show even more potential here. Exciting time in HW field.
So I have this vague recollection that Intel <i>had</i> an FPGA division in the early 90's that they spun off. Was that what became Lattice? Sad that the Interwebs get really murky pre 1995
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich: "We will apply Moore's Law to grow today's FPGA business, and we'll invent new products that make amazing experiences of the future possible"<p>PHB, how you've grown !
Not sure how they think FPGAs are going to reduce their "cloud workload". FPGAs are pretty power hungry (aside from lattice) and only work well if you have some unique requirements.
Fpgas really only accelerate parallel workloads, sequential computation is done easier and just as good with a CPU.<p>Problem with massive parallelism becomes communication costs and spatial routing. Nothing is free.<p>More excited about commodity chips with 100s of cores. Rather have something that's easier to program with a faster dev cycle if I'm going to tackle parallelism.