Hot Chips 2018: Xilinx 7nm ACAP Live Blog

12:42PM EDT - We've covered the initial announcement of Xilinx's Project Everest before, which will be coming to market as an 'ACAP' built on 7nm. Xilinx believes that the ACAP is the future of FPGA computing. The talk is set to start at 9:45am PT / 4:45pm UTC.

12:44PM EDT - Our previous coverage of the ACAP can be found here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12509/xilinx-announces-project-everest-fpga-soc-hybrid

12:46PM EDT - Back in March, Xilinx announced Everest

12:46PM EDT - One of the key blocks is the hw/sw engine

12:46PM EDT - First time giving details

12:46PM EDT - Dev on this block has been in dev for several years

12:47PM EDT - co-designed with input from lots of groups

12:47PM EDT - Not talking about next gen product, just into the block

12:47PM EDT - Tape out in 2018

12:47PM EDT - heterogenous architecture

12:48PM EDT - 20x ML inference, 4x 5G wireless, 40% less power, 7nm engine vs 16nm Ultrascale FPGA

12:48PM EDT - Designed for two main benchmarks: ML Inference and 5G Wireless

12:49PM EDT - Block diagram

12:49PM EDT - application CPU, real-time CPU

12:49PM EDT - sw engine, programmable logic with LUTs, IO

12:49PM EDT - SW Programmable Engine is a domain specific architecture, hardened in 7nm

12:49PM EDT - Scalable blog

12:49PM EDT - block

12:49PM EDT - multiple engines, can scale up

12:50PM EDT - Throughput oriented, low latency

12:50PM EDT - Targeted for ML Inference and 5G wireless

12:50PM EDT - SW Engine talks to the processing system for control

12:50PM EDT - Talks to programmable logic for high bandwidth and connectivity

12:50PM EDT - Feed the beast

12:51PM EDT - Chips with different implementations of the architecture will be announced later

12:51PM EDT - A couple of months

12:51PM EDT - Meeting market requirements and trends

12:52PM EDT - Lots of different workloads where ML is an essential part of processing

12:52PM EDT - Can map high compute on the SW engine

12:53PM EDT - Engine and FPGA parts can work on different parts of the problem

12:53PM EDT - Processing vs data feeding

12:54PM EDT - Also 5G

12:54PM EDT - Designed to be integrated with digital radio and ADC/DAC

12:54PM EDT - Put the compute in the engine, IOs on the logic

12:54PM EDT - Control on the processor sub-system

12:54PM EDT - Now for architecture

12:55PM EDT - SW Engine is Tile based Vector processor

12:55PM EDT - Each tile is interconnect, local memory, vector processor

12:55PM EDT - 100s of operations per cycle per vector processor

12:56PM EDT - Standard 2D mech interconnect with memory snooping of neighbours

12:56PM EDT - Optimized ISA for 5G and ML

12:56PM EDT - Non-blocking interconnect

12:56PM EDT - Up to 200 GB/s bw per tile

12:56PM EDT - Aggregated

12:57PM EDT - Does compute and comms in parallel

12:57PM EDT - Integrated sync of primitives

12:57PM EDT - can share partial results to next cores

12:57PM EDT - cascading interface

12:58PM EDT - Lots of individual features in other Xilinx products but put together

12:58PM EDT - No caches in the architecture

12:58PM EDT - Interconnect is deterministic to guarantee performance

12:58PM EDT - Massive multi-core engine

12:59PM EDT - 10-100s of tiles depending on the product

12:59PM EDT - Distributed memory heirarchy

01:00PM EDT - Data flow can be pipelined or graphed

01:00PM EDT - or multicast

01:01PM EDT - non-neighbor communication between tiles

01:02PM EDT - through the shared memory interconnect

01:03PM EDT - Cascade streaming for dot-product

01:03PM EDT - Device integration

01:04PM EDT - with programmable logic

01:04PM EDT - Up to TB/s of bandwidth between engines and logic

01:05PM EDT - Can include programmable accelerator

01:05PM EDT - or custom on-chip memory hierarchy

01:05PM EDT - implement specialized functions in the FPGA

01:05PM EDT - Pre/post processing or co-processing

01:06PM EDT - There is going to be high-level programming languages, c/c++

01:07PM EDT - guided by the user

01:07PM EDT - Also available, one level down

01:07PM EDT - Full SW Programming Tool Chain - IDE, COmpiler, Debugger, Perf analysis

01:08PM EDT - Performance optimized software libraries

01:08PM EDT - 4G/5G libraries, ML libraries, vision libraries

01:09PM EDT - run-time software

01:09PM EDT - Xilinx ML compiler on any DL framework

01:09PM EDT - Users work at framework level, compiler does it

01:09PM EDT - Seemless migration from 16nm models

01:10PM EDT - High compute efficiency in benchmarks

01:10PM EDT - Image classification 20x over 16nm Ultrascale+

01:11PM EDT - Sub 1ms latency

01:13PM EDT - More details in the keynote later

01:13PM EDT - Xilinx Dev Forum in October

01:13PM EDT - Time for Q&A

01:14PM EDT - Q: What freq on coarse grained blocks? A: Can't tell you, but 2 Gigasamples/sec. Can't disclose power, area, frequency

01:14PM EDT - Q: What's the word-size? A: Can't disclose

01:16PM EDT - Q: Is the PE a fixed point or floating point? A: FP as well with complex math support and multiple precision support. All your favourite for ML

01:18PM EDT - Q: Does the compiler auto-vectorize, or do users write intrinsics? A: No vectorizing compiler, we do different things on that front

01:18PM EDT - That's a wrap. Time for a break, then it's Nanotube DRAM time in 30 mins.