New Intel FPGA Starts Shipping: 40% Better Performance Claimed

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First 10nm FPGAs start shipping

Intel has started shipping its next generation of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), a powerful form of highly customisable silicon that is being increasingly widely used in data centres and by hyperscale cloud service providers.

Claiming a 40 percent performance on its existing Intel Stratix 10 FPGAs, the chip maker said that the Agilex product family, its first 10nm FPGA effort, is landing with early access customers this week, including Microsoft.

The FPGAs can support up to 40 teraFLOPS of digital signal processor (DSP) performance (FP16 Configuration), with each Intel Agilex DSP block performing two FP16 floating-point operations (FLOPs) per clock cycle.*

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“Microsoft has been working closely with Intel on [Agilex development] and we are planning to use them in a number of upcoming projects,” said Doug Burger, technical fellow, Azure Hardware Systems at Microsoft.

He added: “We look forward to continued collaboration with Intel to deliver high-quality cloud services, big data analytics and ultra-intelligent web search results.”

The release follows hot on the heels of FPGA rival Xilinx, which started shipping its own latest “Versal” architecture two months ago (dubbing it an “adaptive compute acceleration platform” (ACAP) rather than a pure FPGA.)

Intel said the architecture features innovations including support for the upcoming Compute Express Link (CXL), a high-speed CPU interconnect; PCIe Gen 5 interconnects; support up to 112 Gbps data rates for high-speed networking requirements and support for upcoming DDR5, HBM and Intel Optane DC persistent memory.