Field Programmable Gate Arrays, or FPGAs, have become increasingly more popular in data centers. In recent years, many specialized workloads have emerged that are not well suited to CPUs like Intel’s Xeon or AMD’s EPYC that can be drastically accelerated with a properly tuned and programmed FPGA. Additionally, FPGAs can be repeatedly tweaked in the field to optimize performance and throughput as new models or algorithms emerge for their intended workload.
To date, Intel has offered an array of FPGA-based solutions to complement its Xeon processors, including integrate solutions that pair a Xeon and FPGA in a single package. Intel’s latest FPGA, however, the Intel Programmable Acceleration Card (PAC) with Intel Stratix 10 SX FPGA is an add-in accelerator featuring the company’s most powerful configuration yet.
The new Intel PAC with Stratix 10 SX FPGA features 2,753K logic elements (-2V speed grade), 244 Mb of embedded memory, and high-performance, multi-gigabit SERDES transceivers (up to 26 Gbps), along with 32 GB of DDR4 memory and 2 GB quad SPI flash memory. The full-sized card connects to a system via a standard PCI Express x16 interface and it offers a common USB 2.0 port for debugging and programming of the FPGA and flash memory.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise will be the first OEM to incorporate the Intel PAC with Stratix 10 SX FPGA into some of its server offerings. Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC and AI Group, at HPE said, “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.”
The Intel Programmable Acceleration Card with Intel Stratix 10 SX FPGA is ideally suited for workloads like streaming analytics, video transcoding, and those associated with the financial sector and genomics.
