That seems like a weak benefit. I don't think the fpga part will be cheap. In fact it will probably be significantly more expensive than the CPU. So then why not buy a chip with twice the cores if running twice the VMs is what you want to do with it? Also you can buy an AMD EPYC chip with twice the cores for about the same price you'd pay only for the CPU part of this chip/half the intel cores.
>Also you can buy an AMD EPYC chip with twice the cores for about the same price you'd pay only for the CPU part of this chip/half the intel cores.
Indeed. What benefits the most from being turned into FPGA circuit are stateless or minimally stateful circuits like media decoders/encoders.
Complex stuff like fancy routers, classifiers, internet protocol inspection/handling will not gain a hundredfold speedup unlike the stuff above. This is why cheap x86 based routers are still a thing.
At the moment, I am involved with one cloud provider in China that bids big on cheap FPGAs and RDMA. AWS and Azures can be defeated in detail.
The plan is following: provide hardware accelerated "building blocks" of any modern dotcom business.
Need memcached? We have it running on RDMA, from a bare metal ASIC, 10 times faster than any x86.
Need transcoding? We have it available on RDMA, from a bare metal ASIC, 10 times cheaper than any AWS instance on buck/megabyte.
Need API proxy for TLS/Gzip with gigabytes per second throughput? We have it running on RDMA, from a box with 4 PCIe accelerators, and AWS has nothing to offer for this use case other than "buy a hundred of top tier high performance instances and put them behind load balancers"
Yeah, but for those one you still have to do all the HDL programming stuff yourself. Alibaba on other hand aims to provide everything ready to use over a cute RDMA api
>"At the moment, I am involved with one cloud provider in China that bids big on cheap FPGAs and RDMA. AWS and Azures can be defeated in detail."
Can you share how this FPGA and RDMA combination works architecturally? What's the software stack composed of? Might you have any links or other resources you could share?
You provision access over in-dc REST api, then rdma capable routers route the appliance to your vm, then you access it through provided libs for linux.
In other words, you don't deal with RDMA yourself at any moment
Folks that need this don't care about the expense. it's about the pipeline between the CPU and FPGA. If it's 5-10x as fast as plugin FPGA, There will be a market.
There could be a win if the FPGA part is efficient. Power and heat are a limiting factor for rack density, and this could allow you to run more machines in a rack than you could otherwise support.
Pretty narrow still, but the market segment is possibly real.
Depends on the functional area. It will be a huge boost for virtual networking especially for virtual network functions. I personally know of cases where we have to wrangle with sr-Iov and dpdk. I will be super interested in the ovs fpga
