In what is the first major use of reprogrammable silicon chips to help speed up mainstream applications in data centres. Intel’s FPGAs are providing the foundation for a new type of data center offering a combination of versatility and speed to handle different workloads.
As the demand for data accelerates, data centre operators are having to balance the need for performance at scale with operational efficiency. To boost performance and power efficiency, many are using Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors to work in tandem with an accelerator to support data-intensive performance requirements within specific functions in a workload.
Dell EMC and Fujitsu have announced that they will incorporate a complete Intel hardware and software stack in their individual offerings, consisting of Intel Programmable Acceleration Cards with the Arria 10 GX FPGA and the Intel Acceleration Stack for Intel Xeon Scalable processor with FPGAs.
The Intel Programmable Acceleration Card simplifies the use of FPGAs in servers. The card contains a networking interface for accelerating workloads such as streaming analytics and video transcoding and dedicated banks of DDR4 memory with error correction. This card also includes the FPGA Interface Manager, and seamlessly pairs with an Intel Xeon processor over the PCIe bus.
Commenting Kenichi Sakai, corporate executive officer and head of Data Center Platform Business Unit of Fujitsu, said, “We are beginning our adoption of Intel Programmable Acceleration Card with Arria 10 GX FPGA with PRIMERGY server and engaging our priority customers. The FPGA acceleration benefits enable operators to tackle the opex constraints while still achieving scale, performance and adaptability.”
Dell EMC PowerEdge R640, R740 and R740XD servers incorporating Intel FPGA acceleration are now available for volume deployment with more to come.
The availability of servers enabling FPGA acceleration is being described a significant milestone in the development of Intel’s programmable chips. The acceleration stack provides a software development environment, making FPGA performance and flexibility accessible to the broader developer community.