Comment by michaelt
6 days ago
Sure, if they wanted to intel could have done what nvidia did with CUDA: Put the tech into everything, even their lowest end consumer devices, and sink hundreds of millions into tooling and developer education given away free of charge.
And maybe it would have lead somewhere. Perhaps. But they didn't.
It was the thought at the time that they'd do this. It's amazing that they don't seem to have actually tried ? Any sense as to why or what went wrong?
I wasn't there, but I've always imagined the conversation went something like this:
Intel: Welcome, Altera. We'd like you to integrate your FPGA fabric onto our CPUs.
Altera: Sure thing, boss! Loads of our FPGAs get plugged into PCIe slots, or have hard or soft CPU cores, so we know what we're doing.
Intel: Great! Oh, by the way, we'll need the ability to run multiple FPGA 'programs' independently, at the same time.
Altera: Ummmm
Intel: The programs might belong to different users, they'll need an impenetrable security barrier between them. It needs full OS integration, so multi-user systems can let different users FPGA at the same time. Windows and Linux, naturally. And virtual machine support too, otherwise how will cloud vendors be able to use it?
Altera: Uh
Intel: We'll need run-time scaling, so large chips get fully utilised, but smaller chips still work. And it'll need to be dynamic, so a user can go from using the whole chip for one program to sharing it between two.
Intel: And of course indefinite backwards compatibility, that's the x86 promise. Don't do anything you can't support for at least 20 years.
Intel: Your toolchain must support protecting licensed IP blocks, but also be 100% acceptable to the open source community.
Intel: Also your current toolchain kinda sucks. It needs to be much easier to use. And stop charging for it.
Intel: You'll need a college outreach program. And a Coursera course. Of course students might not have our hardware, so we'll need a cloud offering of some sort, so they can actually do the exercises in the course.
Altera: I guess to start with we
Intel: Are you profitable yet? Why aren't you contributing to our bottom line?
I think they have tried to improve the software for FPGAs--FPGA backends are part of their oneAPI software stack, for example. And when I was in grad school, Intel was definitely doing courses on building for FPGAs using OpenCL (I remember seeing some of their materials, but I don't know much about them otehr than they existed).
As to why it didn't work, well, I'm not plugged into this space to have a high degree of certainty, but my best guess is "FPGAs just aren't that useful for that many things."
Yes, if they actually made the thing available, maybe people would have used it for something. There were several proofs of concept at the time, with some serious gains, ever for the uses that people ended up using CUDA.
But they didn't actually sell it. At least not in any form anybody could buy. So, yeah, we get the OP claiming it was an obvious technological dead-end.
And if they included it on lower-end chips (the ones they sold just a few years after they brought Altera), we could have basically what the RasPI 2040 is nowadays. Just a decade earlier and controlled by them... On a second thought, maybe this was for the best.