Intel Expands Its Comfort Zone with New ARM-Powered FPGAs for Datacenters

Details: Published: Monday, 31 October 2016 19:35

Intel announced it is sampling its Stratix 10 FPGAs, the latest family of field programmable gate arrays that are designed to accelerate a number of datacenter workloads. The new devices, which Intel is calling “the most significant FPGA innovations in over a decade,” offer advanced features like embedded 64-bit ARM processors, second-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2), and DSP blocks

The server applications Intel is targeting with the Stratix 10 family is somewhat tangential to Nvidia's and AMD's newest GPU accelerators, as well as Intel’s own Knights Landing Xeon Phi.. However Intel believes workloads such as signal processing, data compression, data encryption, storage management, and video encoding – in truth tough, practically any server-side application where data throughput is the driving criteria. With the DSP unit offering lots of hardwired flops, these devices can also be used for high performance computing.