FPGA's Accelerating Cloud and Analytics

Last week was incredible with the news of Intel Shipping Xeon Chips with FPGA Accelerators. This week we're seeing even more in the cloud and analytics "acceleration race": Xilinx hits back with it's new bedfellow IBM: SDAccel Application Development on SuperVessel OpenPower Cloud.

So? What's this mean? Cloud and data analytics are going to get even faster now? Accelerated algorithms, perhaps deployed and loaded on-demand is not so far away?

The triple 'C' drag forces are cost, closed, and the crusty FPGA industry culture. These guys are left back in time. The EE world has not caught on with the waves rocking the software industry in agile development, testing, automation and continuous integration. If not solved, this lovely idea will stay more of a dream than a reality.

There's one and only one way I can see this ever working. The first vendor to embrace open source and become its champion with open tooling is really going to come out on top. They're going to rock out with their FPGA's out gaining serious mind share. The world of open source FPGA tooling is dismal. When a vendor makes this big leap of faith, then open innovation will take over. All sorts of things will happen taking us closer to this dream.

Open source communities have a knack for making their lives easier. They're especially great at creating frameworks on top of frameworks. I would not be surprised to see open source innovation taking the breaks off FPGA development with some nifty innovative frameworks around easily programming them on demand to achieve the gains without the cost of heavy tools. We know this well because our lives are all about using tools and we like them to make things easier for us right?

Also it's about time the FPGA vendors out there realized that they could make a shit load more selling on-demand IP to accelerate mobile and to help increase handset ROI than they could by selling silicon. On-demand will require all the agile ways the open source software community has mastered, entering into the world of IP design.