An Update On Data Center FPGAs

FPGAs from Intel and Xilinx have been steadily carving out niches in datacenter applications where low power, high performance, and configurability may trump programming challenges. Xilinx and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have been working with solution providers to create shrink-wrapped applications and tools which use AWS F1 FPGA instances, and Microsoft has recently announced some pretty stellar results in its Project BrainWave AI program using Intel (Altera) FPGAs. Almost a year ago I covered the initial AWS offerings. At the time, I felt that AWS needed to go from 3 solutions to 30 to convince me and the market that there is real demand, and then to 100 to have a material impact on the market. I recently noticed that AWS is now at 20 Amazon Marketplace Instances (AMIs), so it seemed like a good time to check back in.