Intel is shipping Stratix 10 DX FPGAs which are designed to support Intel Ultra Path Interconnect (Intel UPI), PCI-Express (PCIe) Gen4 x16, and a controller for Intel Optane memory to provide acceleration.
Stratix 10 DX FPGAs with the new interfaces include the option to support select Intel Optane DC persistent memory DIMMs. They increase bandwidth and provide coherent memory expansion and hardware acceleration for Xeon Scalable processors.
Data centre customers increasingly use hardware accelerators, like FPGAs, when more computational speed is required from server systems running networking and cloud-based applications such as AI training/inferencing or database-related workloads.
By diverting certain tasks to accelerators, more CPU cores become available to work on other higher priority workloads, increasing data centre operator efficiency. Intel’s FPGA-based accelerators provide hardware-assisted performance combined with the flexibility to adapt to multiple workloads.
The UPI interface in combination with future select Intel Xeon Scalable Processors is claimed to deliver 37% lower latency and improve overall system performance via coherent data movement and a theoretical peak transfer rate of 28 GB/second. Memory coherent FPGA interfaces are a part of Intel’s roadmap as it moves toward Compute Express Link availability in 2021.
The PCI-SIG compliant Gen4 x16 interface delivers a theoretical peak data bandwidth of 32 GB/second. Both data centre and non-data centre applications will realize about two times more throughput.
The memory controller supports up to eight Intel Optane DC persistent memory DIMMs per FPGA (up to 4 TB of non-volatile memory).
Other existing Stratix 10 FPGA features include 100 GB/second Ethernet, HBM2 memory stacks and a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor subsystem with peripherals.
