This was shared with me today by a designer I’ve worked for in the past. It’s his first computer, the one which is just about to be released is not exactly as this one is. that new board is capable of;
the final design (next quarter) will put 30,000 CPU cores and 64TB of
flash on a single PCI board.
But the key is that it’s using a reconfigurable chip called an FPGA
(Field Programmable Gate Array). So, much like your brain, you can
dynamically reconfigure the paths between computing and storage units.
Historically, these chips have been used for routers and radars. Both
need a ton of I/O, hence these chips have a ton of I/O, and that’s
what we use to connect the chips to massive amounts of flash, giving
us flash that’s faster than RAM for bulk transfers of data. As a
result, we can crunch through massive amounts of data very fast.
In a 4U rack (& inches tall), you can have 300,000 CPU cores and 1PB
of flash, that you can read at 1.3TB/s (B as in Byte, or 8 bits).
I thought this might be of interest so some of the members here so I asked him to come and speak at the space when he visits. He agreed to come in and chat about it.
Yes Hector! You know your stuff, that chip is used in radar applications, (he tells me). He says it’s for banking and intelligence purposes so I would assume it’s for sorting enormous amounts of data.
I assume the final boards will include heat sinks.
Zynq UltraScale+ EG
EG devices feature a quad-core ARM® Cortex-A53 platform running up to 1.5GHz. Combined with dual-core Cortex-R5 real-time processors, a Mali-400 MP2 graphics processing unit, and 16nm FinFET+ programmable logic,
This promotion kit looks very interesting.
But not cheap at over $4000 CND
The amazon fpga clouds have a similar part in them (without the arm cores). It seems they’re really popular, much faster time to market when you don’t need to build the hardware.
