Ryzen Release Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-pa...ntegration

AMD has been doing wonders in the CPU industry, with its well-received and high performing Zen 2 and Zen 3 based processors, but now it seems AMD wants to improve performance not just through faster cores, but through the use of FPGAs. Just a few days ago, AMD filed a patent for integrating FPGAs into a CPU, which would allow the processor to run custom instruction sets to extend the its capabilities. As a side note, this patent was made just a few months after AMD's acquisition of Xilinx, a company dedicated to making FPGAs.
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AMD has yet to announce any new processors that take advantage of an FPGA unit. Still, this technology could be very beneficial in the future for improving processor performance as CPU architectures continue to become more difficult to shrink.

https://www.techpowerup.com/276804/amd-a...a-elements

As it stands, this sort of design would allow, in theory, for an updatable CPU that might never need to be upgraded when it comes to new instruction support: since FPGA is a programmable hardware logic, a simple firmware update could allow the CPU to reconfigure its FPGA array so as to be able to process new, exotic instructions as they are released. Another argument for this integration is that in this way, some fixed-function silicon that is today found in CPUs and that serve to support legacy x86 instructions could be left out of the die, to be taken care of by the FPGA package itself - enabling a still-on-board hardware accelerator for when (and if) these instructions are required.

This would also allow AMD to trim the CPU of the "dark silicon" that is currently present - essentially, highly specialized hardware acceleration blocks that sit idly, as a waste of die space, when not in use. The bottom line is this: CPUs with lower die space reserved for highly specialized operations, thus with more die area available for other resources (such as more cores), and with integrated, per-core FPGA elements that would on-the-fly reconfigure themselves according to processing needs. And if there are no exotic operations required (such as AI inferencing and acceleration, AVX (for example), video hardware acceleration, or other workloads, then the FPGA elements can just be reconfigured to "turbo" the CPU's own floating point and integer units, increasing available resources. An interesting patent application, for sure.