Intel Gets Cozy With FPGAs

Not to be left out of the FPGA acceleration party, Intel has teamed up with Altera and XtremeData to deliver a Xeon-friendly version of FPGA coprocessing.  The XD2000i module consists of three Stratix III FGPAs hooked onto Intel’s front side bus (FSB). From the Altera press release:

“With today’s release of the XD2000i, it’s an exciting time for the industry,” said Ravi Chandran, CEO of XtremeData. “Using Altera’s Stratix III FPGA, the XD2000i delivers up to five times the logic capacity of previous generations of ISAs. Additionally, it offers unparalleled double-precision floating performance per watt, the key benchmark requested by our customers in high-performance computing and financial analytics.”

Nallatech and Mitrionics have also announced an FPGA-FSB solution, in this case, with Xilinx hardware. The press release is here.

These are the first instances of FPGA coprocessing for an Intel platform. XtremeData as well as DRC Computer Corp. and Celoxica have similar offerings for AMD’s HyperTransport technology.