AMD Introduces World’s Largest FPGA-Based Adaptive SoC for Emulation
Finally! I&#x27;ve waited 25 years for something like this, which totally derailed the career I had envisioned for myself. I might even lose the option of making fun of all new chips for providing marginal performance increases for exponentially growing complexity, and have to find a new shtick.<p>A few predictions&#x2F;concerns:<p>* I can&#x27;t find a price, so I&#x27;m predicting that it will be over $1,000 which will prevent it from going mainstream (and also be ~10 times more expensive than it should be).<p>* There will be poison pill(s). Maybe flash memory that can only be written 1000 times, preventing its use for evolutionary hardware and genetic algorithms. Maybe the place-and-route software won&#x27;t be good enough to prevent short circuits, so certain configurations will burn up. Maybe some aspect of the software will be proprietary and&#x2F;or encumbered by patents, preventing hobbyists from thinking outside the box and &quot;getting real work done&quot;.<p>* Any dedicated hardware like memories, ALUs, etc may be misaligned for various use-cases. I just want an array of RISC-V, Arm, DEC Alpha, PowerPC 601&#x2F;603, something like that, starting with 2 and topping 100 or 1000 cores eventually. So where I&#x27;ll need memories near CPUs, something in the FPGA will lack the interconnect to allow that.<p>I hope I&#x27;m wrong about any or all of these. Price I can live with, as long as economies of scale or competition kick in and eventually deliver something under $1,000. The rest of it.. eh, I&#x27;m not holding my breath. I&#x27;ve been underwhelmed by all previous FPGAs, but maybe they didn&#x27;t count. Maybe this is something new that finally manifests the original vision of what FPGAs could be.