March 7, 2022 — Intel today introduced product details for the Intel Agilex M-Series FPGAs, built on Intel 7 process technology. The company offering has the industry’s highest memory bandwidth FPGAs with in-package HBM DRAM.
“The Intel Agilex M-Series incorporates several new functional innovations and features that provide the industry with the high-speed networking, computing and memory acceleration required to meet ever-more ambitious performance and capability goals for networks, cloud and embedded edge applications,” the company said.
New features, according to Intel, include:
- The industry’s highest memory bandwidth for an FPGA.
- The industry’s highest DSP compute density in an HBM-enabled FPGA.
- Greater than 2X fabric performance per watt vs. competitive 7nm FPGAs.
Intel Agilex M-series FPGAs are the first members of the Intel Agilex device family to provide in-package HBM2e memory and include hardened controllers for other state-of-the-art memory technologies such as DDR4, DDR5, and LPDDR5. Two hardened memory network-on-chip (NoC) functions provide the FPGA fabric with high-bandwidth, resource-efficient access to both in-package HBM2e and onboard memory resources.
“With the exponential growth of data in the world today, coupled with the shift from centralized clusters of compute and data storage to a more distributed architecture that processes data everywhere — in the cloud, at the edge, and at all points in between — Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are taking on an increasingly important role in modern applications from the data center to the network to the edge,” Intel said. “The flexibility, power efficiency, massively parallel architecture, and huge input/output (I/O) bandwidth make FPGAs attractive for accelerating a wide range of tasks from high-performance computing (HPC) to storage and networking. Many of these applications put enormous demands on memory, including capacity, bandwidth, latency and power efficiency.”
Further, Intel said Agilex M-series FPGAs offer class-leading transceiver data rates, critical for systems processing enormous data loads. With support for PCI Express (PCIe) Gen5, Compute Express Link, 400G Ethernet, and serial transceivers operating up to 116 Gbps, Intel Agilex M-series devices support the throughput requirements of the most demanding applications from the data center to the edge.
Among the markets the Intel Agilex M-series FPGAs are built for are test and measurement (arbitrary waveform generators, 5G/6G cellular network test, GHz RF test); data centers (HPC, cloud computing, cryptocurrency mining); wireless and wireline (high data rate (800G+) transmission, optical transport network (OTN), network functions virtualization (NFV), 5G Baseband), and aerospace and defense (radar, electronic warfare).
