Back in 2015, when Intel was flush with cash thanks to a near-monopoly from X86 datacenter compute, it shelled out an incredible $16.7 billion to acquire FPGA maker Altera because a few hyperscalers and cloud builders were monkeying around with offloading whole chunks of CPU compute to FPGAs to create SmartNICs. …
If you squint your eyes, a modern FPGA looks like a programmable logic device was crossbred with the mutt of a switch ASIC and an SoC. …
If FPGAs are going to take off in the datacenter in their own right, they are going to need their own killer apps. …
Intel has spent more than three decades evolving from the dominant provider of CPUs for personal computers to the dominant supplier of processors for servers in the datacenter. …
Intel has started shipping a new FPGA accelerator card based on the high-end Stratix 10 SX FPGA. …
When Intel purchased Altera in 2015 for $16.7 billion, company officials predicted that up to a third of servers would be equipped with FPGAs by 2020. …
Intel is gearing up the FPGA user base it inherited from Altera for the release of Stratix 10 hardware and companion application acceleration stack. …
The use of FPGAs in HPC is limited less by the capabilities of current hardware and more by the challenges in programming them without sacrificing performance. …
There has been much written about the potential for FPGAs to take a leadership role in accelerating deep learning but in practice, the hurdles of getting from concept to high performance hardware design are still taller than many AI shops are willing to scale, particularly when GPUs dominate in training and in a pinch, standard CPUs will do just fine for datacenter inference since they involve little developer overhead. …
Last week at the Fujitsu Forum in Tokyo, Lisa Spelman, who is general manager of Xeon products and Data Center Marketing at Intel, did a soft announcement of the hybrid Xeon CPU-Arria 10 FPGA hybrid chip that the company has been talking about for years and that is now available to selected customers. …
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