Comment by imtringued
5 days ago
Yeah I personally wondered if AMD was just copying Intel, because apparently every CPU manufacturer also needs to manufacture FPGAs, or they actually have a long term strategy where it is essential for both the FPGA and CPU departments to cooperate.
I think Xilinx did a fine job with their AI Engines and AMD decided to integrate a machine learning focused variant on their laptops as a result. The design of the intel NPU is nowhere near as good as AMD's. I have to say that AMD is not a software company though and while the hardware is interesting, their software support is nonexistent.
Also, if you're worried about FPGAs that doesn't really make much sense, since Effinix is killing it.
I briefly hoped that, like the integration of GPUs, there would be a broader integration of programmable logic in general purpose CPUs, with AMD integrating Xilinx fabric and Intel integrating Altera fabric. But I could never imagine a real use case and apparently there wasn't a marketable enough one either. Something like high-level synthesis ending up like CUDA always seemed like it would present a neat development environment for certain optimizations.
I wanted that, too. Then, integrated with something like Synflow:
https://www.synflow.com/