Xilinx Announces Commercial Availability of FSB FPGA Computing Tool for Intel Xeon 7300 Series Platforms
November 15, 2007 // Published as a news service by IHS
Xilinx Inc. began commercial licensing of its field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based acceleration tool to interface with the Intel front side bus (FSB).
Enabled by the 65 nanometer (nm) Virtex-5 platform FPGA and Intel QuickAssist technology, the Xilinx accelerated computing platform (ACP) M1 licensing package supports implementations capable of 1,066 MHz FSB performance.
The ACP M1 licensing package is available to system integrators for developing products that accelerate the performance of Intel processor-based server platforms while minimizing power consumption and total cost of ownership, Xilinx said.
"High performance ACP modules help fuel the growing demand for FSB-based accelerator solutions," said Lorie Wigle, director of server technology and initiatives marketing, digital enterprise group, Intel Corp.
"Certain workloads in servers can benefit from closely coupled FPGA accelerators. With the Xilinx ACP M1, Intel QuickAssist technology and its accelerator abstraction layer, we expect our customers to benefit from a complete system solution," Wigle said.
The Xilinx ACP M1 hardware reference design is pin compatible to an Intel Socket 604 Xeon processor and is targeted for the new Intel Xeon processor 7300 series multiprocessor data center platform.
With a 1,066 MHz FSB interface, each Virtex-5 based ACP M1 module delivers 8.5 GBps of system memory bandwidth. Featuring four independent 1,066 MHz FSB interfaces, the 7300 data center platform delivers 34 GBps of aggregate bandwidth, which enables a variety of FPGA and Xeon processor configurations (1:3, 2:2 or 3:1 is supported).
"ACP modules are ideal for accelerating the performance of computationally intensive workload computing," said Ivo Bolsens, chief technology officer (CTO) of Xilinx.
"By leveraging the high-performance features of the Virtex-5 FPGA family, the ACP M1 supports transaction latencies of less than 120 ns and can sustain burst transfers at full system speed. This performance enables platform developers to achieve superior application throughput without having to cluster multiple computers together or significantly increase their data center power consumption or total cost of ownership," Bolsens said.
The ACP M1 license package is available now to qualified system integrators wishing to develop commercial FSB accelerated platforms based on Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs. Qualification also requires an Intel FSB use license.
Source: Xilinx Inc.