[slivym]

It's a good question: the answer is that they have done this. (or atleast they are doing this) https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/05/24/a-peek-inside-that-i...

What's proving to be a problem though is where does this fit? If you don't have a clear need for an FPGA then just buy a normal Xeon. If you do need an FPGA then why compromise your Xeon? Have an FPGA card, or hell a group of FPGA cards.

The only place this makes sense is if you can think of a use case where you have an FPGA task that needs low latency communication with your CPU. Even with this chip though you have an uphill struggle because the cache hierarchy of a Xeon makes access to memory non-deterministic which traditionally isn't what FPGAs are designed for. It's much more difficult to design your algorithm on FPGA to deal with arbitrary memory latency.

So the question back to you is: What would you use it for?

[tyingq]

The TI AM335x CPU has something (sort of) like this...basically 2 microcontrollers that share memory with the ARM cpus.

People have done some pretty clever things with it. Audio processing, driving LED matrix boards, emulating old video boards, driving precision servos, software oscopes and logic analyzers, etc.

Though that's in a small dev board, like the Beaglebone Black, not a beefy Intel server.

[ashleyn]

It doesn't have a use case, at least not yet. But easy, cheap gains are running out in general-purpose computing as we near 1nm process. Heterogenous computing will then become more relevant, and a great way to do that is an FPGA.