IDG Contributor Network: Intel ships Stratix 10 DX FPGAs with PCIe 4 and Optane support, partners with VMWare
Continuing its evolution in the intelligent, adaptable data center market, Intel just announced its latest series of Stratix 10 FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), which incorporate a number of new features and capabilities, have begun shipping in limited quantities to key partners. Intel’s new Stratix 10 DX series of FPGAs bring with them support for the company’s UPI, or Ultra Path Interconnect, in addition to PCI Express 4.0 and Optane DC Persistent memory technology.
As data center workloads become more diverse and complex, the use of flexible, programmable FPGA-based accelerators to complement traditional CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs is becoming increasingly more common. Due to the fact that FPGAs can be programmed and tuned on-the-fly for specific algorithms and workloads that may not be well-suited to CPUs or GPUs, their use in burgeoning fields like machine learning and big data analytics is exploding. In addition to accelerating specific workloads, because FPGAs help offload tasks from other compute engines in a system, they also free those engines to perform other operations, and ultimately increase efficiency and compute density.