Intel adds to portfolio of FPGA programmable acceleration cards

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Intel has extended its field programmable gate array (FPGA) acceleration platform portfolio with the addition of the Programmable Acceleration Card (PAC) with a Stratix 10 SX FPGA, Intel’s most powerful FPGA.

This high-bandwidth card leverages the Acceleration Stack for Intel Xeon CPU with FPGAs, providing data centre developers with a more a robust platform to deploy FPGA-based accelerated workloads. Hewlett Packard Enterprise will be the first OEM to incorporate this into its server offering.

“We’re seeing a growing market for FPGA-based accelerators, and with Intel’s new FPGA solution, more developers – no matter their expertise – can adopt the tool and benefit from workload acceleration. We plan to use the Intel Stratix 10 PAC and acceleration stack in our offerings to enable customers to easily manage complex, emerging workloads," said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC and AI Group, HPE

Like the previously announced Intel PAC with Intel Arria 10 FPGA, this Intel PAC supports an ecosystem of design partners that delivers IP to accelerate a wide range of application workloads. The Intel PAC is a larger form factor card built for inline processing and memory-intensive workloads, like streaming analytics and video transcoding. While the smaller form factor Intel PAC is intended for back testing, data base acceleration and image processing workloads.

As the demands for big data and artificial intelligence (AI) increase, the reprogrammable technology of the FPGA is well placed to meet the processing requirements and changing workloads of data centre applications.

With reconfigurable logic, memory and digital signal processing blocks, FPGAs can be programmed to execute any type of function with high throughput and real-time performance, making them ideal for many critical enterprise and cloud applications.

The acceleration stack for Intel Xeon CPU with Intel FPGAs works with industry-leading OS, virtualization and orchestration software partners, providing a common interface for software developers to get faster time to revenue, simplified management and access to a growing ecosystem of acceleration workloads.

The solution Includes:

* Intel-validated Intel Programmable Acceleration Card (PAC) with Intel Stratix 10 SX FPGA.

* Production-grade FPGA Interface Manager (FIM) to which Intel and partner AFUs are connected.

* Acceleration Stack for Intel Xeon CPU with FPGAs, including a common set of APIs and open-source drivers that work seamlessly with industry-leading OS, virtualization and orchestration software across the portfolio of Intel programmable acceleration cards.

* Workloads available through acceleration workload storefront for ease of evaluation.