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by teleforce 452 days ago
Modern CPU architecture for example the Versal architecture from AMD has seamless integration with compute accelerators namely FPGA, GPU, DSP, etc [1].

They even has built-in ADC/DAC for communicatiobmn, sensing and data acquisition (DAQ) [2].

On top of that they have native support for dataflow library and framework including linear algebra that is more suitable for data-intensive in which AI is only one of the intended applications [3].

I was recently asked by my colleague why we still need CPU, since GPU is very dominant now and it seems it's all that we need. I just pointed out GPU is only one of the many accelerators available to the CPU, but a very good one that happened to be very useful and biased towards fancy killer applications namely graphic (game), blockchain (bitcoin) and AI (LLM/ChatGPT).

[1] AMD Adaptive SoC Platform: Versal Architecture [pdf]:

https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/products/ad...

[2] AMD adds RF-sampling data converters to Versal adaptive SoCs (2024):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42899304

[3] AIEBLAS: Open-Source Expandable BLAS Implementation for AMD/Xilinx Versal Device:

https://github.com/atlarge-research/AIE-BLAS