Really, I think the problem is one of cost. Firstly, the previously mentioned Stratix 10 (>$20 000 each I think I have seen) can cost as much as 160 Xeon cores ($2000/16 cores).
The price you see there is for digikey, farnell, whatever it is. If you'd buy thousands of them, the price would be ridiculously low. E.g. we use FPGA, which costs around 50USD in digikey, but we get it for around 6USD. If we'd increase the volumes, that would be even less and would hit the <10% mark of the price of digikey.
I appreciate that is the case, which is why I used the 1pc price for the Xeon as well. Since they are both made at the same fab, I imagine that the price would scale similarly.
I am pretty sure they are not paying more than 10 USD for that piece of logic on the silicon. This is why:
The silicon is expensive, because it's on the process, that's difficult to manufacture correctly. Now Altera don't have any responsibility for that, thus not investing anything in the silicon itself. This means, that Intel is the only responsible for this and their product. I'd say the FPGA fabric on their CPUs are dirt cheap.
Ok fair enough, but I think we will have to agree to disagree on this one
I have been under the impression that FPGAs are expensive because: yield is bad (in terms of $ loss per failure), die is huge/complex and the market is low volume. While this may solve the last problem, now if you lose the FPGA section of the die, you also lose a potentially perfectly working Xeon too. Or I guess they could just switch off the FPGA and bin it as a plain old CPU. I don't know if the piece of silicon is only worth $10, but I guess I do not have any insight into that (never had a chip fabbed before). Perhaps some other forum members could help out on this one?
But still, this is all beside the point. I want a datacentre full of FPGAs, I just don't want it to be full of Xeons too!
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
