Hot Chips 2020 Live Blog: Intel 10nm Agilex FPGAs (8:30am PT)

11:27AM EDT - First Session of Day 2 is on FPGAs, with Intel's 10nm Agilex up first

11:27AM EDT - I saw one last year at a Stratix 10 briefing

11:30AM EDT - And here we go, presentation about to begin

11:31AM EDT - Ralph Wittig from Xilinx is the session chair

11:32AM EDT - Agilex is Intel's first in-house FPGA

11:32AM EDT - customized 10nm process

11:32AM EDT - 40% higher perf, 40% lower power, compared to Stratix

11:32AM EDT - Supports up to 116 Gbps

11:33AM EDT - Variants will support CXL, DDR4/DDR5, HBM2e and Optane

11:33AM EDT - Agilex is the Spatial component in its strategy - also supports OneAPI

11:33AM EDT - Second gen EMIB

11:33AM EDT - Disaggregated transceivers and HBM tiles

11:34AM EDT - Meets specific customer needs

11:34AM EDT - Programming logic is kept monolithic

11:34AM EDT - Floorplan has improved

11:34AM EDT - Smooth fabric grid without I/O disruptions

11:34AM EDT - No notches in the fabric

11:35AM EDT - Arm processor complex has been moved to the corners to eliminate those notches

11:35AM EDT - Rectangular fabric simplifies customer routing

11:35AM EDT - Identical resourcing across the fabric

11:35AM EDT - Quad Arm A53 sub-system, ECC L1/L2 with snoop control

11:36AM EDT - Secure Device Manager, triple redundant hard processor, crypto, SEU events, device boot order

11:36AM EDT - Memory and GPIO

11:36AM EDT - Up to 8TB support with HBM2e

11:36AM EDT - *Up to 8TB with Optane, HBM2e is separate

11:36AM EDT - EMIB bridges are 'AIB'

11:37AM EDT - Five types of tiles for Agilex

11:37AM EDT - Trancievers, PCIe 4, PCIe 5, Ethernet, CXL

11:37AM EDT - Uses Intel's standard 10nm process with customizations

11:37AM EDT - Metal stack improvments

11:38AM EDT - wider poly pitch, Vt tuning, custom layouts and dummy fill enhancements

11:38AM EDT - Each fabric sector has columns of logic and memory

11:38AM EDT - Logic speed +50%

11:38AM EDT - BF16, FP19, FP16, INT8 increased throughput

11:39AM EDT - Programmable clock delays

11:39AM EDT - Hyperflex ties all the blocks together

11:40AM EDT - Old - Mux -> Buffer -> Signal across columns. Fan out to other muxes. High FI/FO didn't scale to 10nm

11:40AM EDT - Now narrow low fan out muxes and redesigned routing pattern

11:40AM EDT - C4 routing delay has a big improvement

11:41AM EDT - Agilex has repartitioned crossbar, allows suppor of narrower faster muxes

11:41AM EDT - 2.5x faster vs stratix10 crossbar delay

11:42AM EDT - 40%+ geomean Fmax improvement

11:42AM EDT - Using same code as Stratix without any change

11:43AM EDT - Comparing GX1100 with Agilex AGF014

11:43AM EDT - Five tile types

11:43AM EDT - New R-Tile for Agilex - PCIe5 and CXL

11:43AM EDT - 16 lanes of 32 Gbps NRZ per tile

11:44AM EDT - Full support for CXL 1/2/3 configs

11:44AM EDT - F-Tile is high speed networking

11:44AM EDT - Two groups of transceiver PHYs

11:44AM EDT - Up to 116G

11:45AM EDT - Bifurcatable up to 400 GbE

11:45AM EDT - PCIe 4 x16

11:46AM EDT - 1e-7 BER in 116G, two order of magnitudes better than the standard requires

11:46AM EDT - Different Agilex families

11:47AM EDT - F-Series, I-Series, M-Series. The images at the beginning of the blog was F-Series

11:48AM EDT - Now to software and OneAPI

11:48AM EDT - Programmable registers at every stage

11:48AM EDT - ASIC-style clocking architecture

11:48AM EDT - Quartus software co-designed with the hardware

11:49AM EDT - Quartus has been revamped to be timing-centric

11:49AM EDT - Accurate delays without rerouting connections

11:49AM EDT - Additional Fmax unlocks

11:50AM EDT - Retiming aware that can fix critical paths

11:50AM EDT - Design specific clock routing

11:51AM EDT - Sequential circuit optimization technique for Fmax

11:52AM EDT - This is a bit over my head. Hope you're getting something out of this :)

11:55AM EDT - Fine grained clock timing of 3ns

11:55AM EDT - Agilex has flexible clock skewing in the hardware, used by Quantus to help improve Fmax by 4% on average

11:56AM EDT - Different types of developers: low level or high level

11:56AM EDT - OneAPI offering is a compiler and toolchain for DC++ for direct programming as well as API programming

11:56AM EDT - Layered on top of the OpenCL offering which has Quartus Prime Pro as its base

11:57AM EDT - Q&A Time

11:58AM EDT - Q: What process? A: 10nm SuperFin with enhancements, such as metal stack. Subsequent products may leverage new enhancements

11:59AM EDT - Q: New plans to bring Xeon + FPGA in package? A: Nothing to disclose right now

12:00PM EDT - Q: EMIB now, Foveros coming? A: EMIB for tiles and HBM - some other experimental projects announced to create a chiplet ecosystem. Intel has many packaging technologies, so we look at many different opportunities but nothing to disclose right now.

12:00PM EDT - (Intel announced next-gen FPGA with Foveros at architecture day)

12:01PM EDT - Q: Register everywhere strategy from Stratix 10? A: We optimized hyperflex registers by reducing overall count while keeping Fmax abilities. We have enough so we can exploit them all. We also optimized it for setup-and-hold characteristics. We matured the algorithms in Quartus too.

12:02PM EDT - That's a wrap. Next up is Xilinx Versal, head on over to that live blog