I find it interesting that you left out IBM, especially considering that Sony came close to cutting Nvidia out of the PS3 gig completely because there was the initial estimate that the Cell would have enough juice to do the graphics on it's own [sorry, I can't seem to find the citation now]... anyway it turned out not to be the case (for now), but heck even the thought must've been enough to make nVidia and ATi worry. And they do worry. So much so that they recognise (to their credit) that they can't just sit pretty; they're not just worried about each other anymore (in the same way that Intel and AMD got into that MHz war); they realise they both have bigger problems to deal with. The nature of computer systems is evolving, as it always will, with workload characteristics. At one time the CPU simply did processing, ALL the processing... then the GPU "revolution" happened. Now nVidia wants to do audio processing on GPUs (and there's this whole community doing all sorts of things with them), meanwhile if IBM has their way they'll put GPU functionality back into their CPU. Who knows what's next.

I think your presumption that we can't "catch up" to the Intels of the world is misplaced, because while we probably can't build a better Pentium 4 than Intel, would we really want to? As workload characteristics change architectures must evolve.

SoC is big. Media processing is big. Sensor networks is going to be big (good luck putting a Pentium into one of those, lol). When the whole triple-play bla bla takes off and people can have another 10k channels with nothing good to watch there will be another round of router upgrades to be done, things like pipelined memory etc will come into play then, as will specially designed line cards etc etc etc... and fantastic progress in FPGAs massively reduces the barrier to entry for startups with special skills and ideas.

It's a mighty big pie. We don't have to have all of it, but we need to have the foresight and balls to claim some of it when the time is right.

Actually I was just quoting the previous post bcoz he mentioned only those 3 companies.

anyway, thanx for sharing your valuable thoughts. imho, we cant catcup up bcoz only a small amount of of Malaysian can actually understand and has the knowledge to build different parts of the CPU. However, it might take a very very long time (maybe up to 10-20 years for a P4, from architectural design until the manufacturing). We have experts here, but the amount is too little compare to developed countries. We can design IPs, but not the whole process from designing --> validating -> manufacturing.

i am computer repairer and service for my friend and family!

The most hardest hardware to build apa?

i think CPU lah!

Hey dude, please dont spam here if you are not talking about electronics engineering related stuff.

Sorry, my bad, I should have noticed the context

I see your point, but correct me if I'm wrong, besides IP design the rest of the job becomes much simpler if PLDs (especially FPGAs) are used right? I think that's good enough for Malaysian companies to contribute to strategic niche industries, and anyway FPGA growth atm is outpacing ASIC growth, according to Gartner:

(A bit outdated, I know, but Gartner charges USD10k for the latest report, so... erm... no thanks )

Well... assuming we're still talking about CPUs... you can't really implement a competitive CPU on a FPGA...

I agree with charge-n-go. I think it's better to specialize, at least initially. Start small and then expand.

This post has been edited by ikanayam: Jul 14 2006, 09:26 AM

While obviously not competitive to the coal-makers from Intel or AMD's stables, FPGA-based "soft core" CPUs are capable enough to go up against lower spec ARMs and MIPses. And that's a huge piece of the pie right there.

And that's how everything is supposed to start. I guess the dotcom bubble mentality of "think big, start big, get bigger" is still lingering around.

That's assuming you limit your definition of "CPU" to von Neumann architecture cache based processors that will sit in a PC to do general-purpose computing tasks... which certainly isn't the only kind of "computing" there is. FPGAs have beaten Pentiums for pattern analysis. Keith Underwood of the SDSC had shown 2 years ago that FPGAs can beat Pentiums for floating-point arithmetic (and that was before the Virtex 5, with it's beefed up multipliers). For general purpose and/or control-intensive irregular code FPGAs will lose out, but that's just one part of the whole picture.

My intention with my last few posts to this thread was to point out that there's a lot more opportunity out there, and limiting oneself to "competing with Intel" is likely to be both unproductive and unrewarding. But that's just my opinion

At the end of the day there's no accounting for personal desire, and there's no discounting personal will power, so if someone really wants to put "MalaysiaBoleh Inside"... I probably won't buy stock right away, but they will have my moral support, FWIW

[edit: added the word "irregular"]

This post has been edited by int19h: Jul 14 2006, 09:42 AM

no probs, i tend to ignore old posts too


imho, programming the FPGA = designing an IP, since we are dealing with verilog / vhdl only. We are still using ppl's product and implement our ideas, just like the earlier proton using mitsubishi engines.

anyway, u r good in FPGA related stuff. r u working in Altera/Xilinx?

Yes, i was taking a narrow definition of CPU, referring to the whole intel/AMD thing.

I agree that the embedded/co-processor market is worth looking into. However the co-processor market is getting much more competitive now, especially with the coming of dx10 capable GPUs later this year.

Embedded systems market is of course still nice and open. Probably the best bet. But i don't think FPGAs are competitive for any sort of mass production. But i'm an ASIC fanboi, so sue me

I have some much better thought out ideas on this but i'm not so sure i want to put (potentially) valuable IP on a public forum...

edit: added (potentially) for great justice

This post has been edited by ikanayam: Jul 14 2006, 10:04 AM

Hey, let's kickstart a closed tech forum for geeks like us

anyway, ASIC definitely has the speed advantage when it is optimized correctly. FPGA is good for designing prototypes, but not for mass production.

... there's one more area where FPGA are used out of necessity: low volume systems. I've used production quality 4-socket ISDN line cards (meant for ISDN routers) that were powered by Xilinx FPGAs.

And no, I don't work for an FPGA vendor

good call...

icic. my working area oso got some low volume cards with altera and xilinx fpga on it. usually they are used to generate special algorithm to carry out testings on new products. Well, I'm not involved in that area, js see those chips on the card, tat's all

FPGA outpacing ASIC? more like more companies are embracing FPGA due to it's rapid prototyping(which cuts a lot of cost compare to prototyping an ASIC which a single mask layout already cost an atom bomb(j/k )
it'll never be mainstream especially it's current structure, and also not to forget certain disadvantage like not being able to do programmable analogue mixed signal(but i heard there is already a programmable analogue device, think it was called FPAA)

FPGA are never meant to be competitive at all, it's speed already puts it in some disadvantages, not to mention cost and utilizations etc
so, it's not bad being a "fanboy" of an ASIC , coz i believe it still rules in terms of catering for the mass market(even catering for 1 million clients is still consider niche in the current industrial standard


no, not low volume, it's Xtremely low volume........but ISDN cards were like stoneage compare to current DSL, so i would suspect that during then, the embracement towards ASIC were a little lukewarm(especially ISDN since the response it received was lukewarm too )

This post has been edited by X10A Freedom: Jul 14 2006, 11:03 AM

Btw guys, first of all lemme just say I've been enjoying this discussion, it's nice to get different information, views and arguments! But now I should get back to work lol... if any new posts I will follow up tmr or day after k

First you've got to reach the mass market. I'm not proposing that FPGAs replace ASICs. As others have pointed out, you start small and grow. Utilising FPGAs allows you to get products into the market early, and that allows you to:
a) Tweak your product as time goes by - EXTREMELY important in networking applications where vendors often screw up their implementation of protocols, so your product has to compensate for the screw-ups of others if customers are to think highly of you.
b) Wait for the market to grow.
If b) doesn't happen, it's not so tragic because you haven't over-committed yourself in terms of NRE.

The counter-argument would be to use general purpose programmable processors in the above 2 situations. The problem with that is
a) getting a favourable power/performance ratio within a specified form factor (big heatsinks may be a no-no)
b) you lose out on the possibility to eventually seamlessly take it to structured ASIC.
An obvious compromise is to utilise softcores for the "contentious" parts of the application, and move some suitable and universally standardized parts to custom logic.

And anyway, if you serve a niche low-volume market, there are perks too... less support issues, and you get to charge a premium for your product. We paid USD5k for our E1 line card. Starbridge Systems charges USD100k to oil companies for a special-purpose 7-FPGA seismic processing accelerator. I'm not sure how much TimeLogic charges for their bioinformatics accelerators. None of these companies is public-listed, so I'm not sure how well they are doing, but these niche markets wouldn't even exist at all if it weren't for breakthroughs in FPGA performance. And for the record, in bioinformatics there was a company called Paracel that tried to do acceleration on ASICs... FWIW they lost out in the market; I won't say exactly why because of course I don't have all the facts and figures (again they were a private company), but I'm sure you can detect my bias

I'm not saying FPGAs pwn ASICs, I'm just saying that their recent performance gains opens up a lot of possibilities that previously simply weren't available. FPGAs may not end up in consumer's homes, but the market is bigger than that.

(Now we've gone a bit OT for this thread, but anyway...)
E1 PRI (a standard for carrying multiple ISDN channels) is still used by enterprise and carriers as the backbone for digital voice due to it's ability to provide better QoS guarantees. Clearly VoIP seeks to, and will eventually, change that, but at least up until recently ISDN still got (gets?) some love. I'm out of that industry now though, the last system I commisioned in Malaysia was 2 years ago, so consider this info 2 years old.

I should probably clarify at this point: when I spoke of "4-socket ISDN" in an earlier post, I actually meant 4-socket E1... I said ISDN instead of E1 because I find more people know about ISDN than E1.

sorry dude!

sorry for interrupt the topic, wanna ask wheather anyone familiar with microstrip circuit??

i'm currently taking computer electronics in mmu, cyberjaya, 2nd year. so far i've managed to score computer related subjects(digital logic, programming, OS, etc) with no problems, since i'm really interested in those, but i'm kind of struggling with other subjects like field theory and electronics... ugh

i'm starting to wonder if i can graduate within 4 years.