Intel Gears Up For FPGA Push

Chip giant Intel has been talking about CPU-FPGA compute complexes for so long that it is hard to remember sometimes that its hybrid Xeon-Arria compute unit, which puts a Xeon server chip and a midrange FPGA into a single Xeon processor socket, is not shipping as a volume product. But Intel is working to get it into the field and has given The Next Platform an update on the current plan. The hybrid CPU-FPGA devices, which are akin to AMD's Accelerated Computing Units, or APUs, in that they put compute and, in this case, GPU acceleration into a single processor package, are expected to see widespread adoption, particularly among hyperscalers and cloud builders who want to offload certain kinds of work from the CPU to an accelerator. While Intel has GPUs of its own and it puts them in a CPU package or on the CPU die for certain parts of the market – low-end workstations and low-end servers based on the Xeon E3 chip that are used to accelerate media processing and such – Intel is not enthusiastic about offloading work from its Xeon processors to other devices. It created the "Knights" family of parallel X86 processors first as an offload engine and then as a full processor in its own right with the "Knights Landing" Xeon Phi 7200 series that saw initial shipments in late 2015 and formally launched in the summer of 2016.