Intel Arria 10 GX FPGA Card For Servers

When Intel makes an enormous move into the world of FPGAs, one takes note. One of the major reasons for this is that Microsoft has become a major FPGA user for their AI cloud. We gave an overview here: Microsoft Shows off Project BrainWave Persistent Inferencing from FPGA Cache. Essentially Microsoft is teaming a 40Gb network interface with a FPGA. The next question many had is when is the rest of the world going to see something like this. The first step of that may be the Intel Programmable Acceleration Card with Arria 10 GX FPGA.

Intel Arria 10 GX FPGA Card For Servers Angle

Here is Intel’s block diagram for the card:

Intel Arria 10 GX FPGA Card For Servers Diagram

One can see that the card has a QSFP interface for 40GbE or 4x 10GbE as well as 8GB DDR4 ECC RAM all on a PCIe host card.

Beyond the hardware, Intel knows it needs to bridge the gap between the relative ease of using NVIDIA CUDA, and the installed base there, and using FPGAs. Intel has a set of design tools with the cards to help those work with the FPGAs including libraries.

Intel Arria 10 GX FPGA Card Quick Specs

• 10AX115N2F40E2LG
• High-performance, multi-gigabit SERDES transceivers up to 15 Gbps
• 1150K logic elements available (-2L speed grade)
• 53 Mb of embedded memory

On-Board Memory

• 8 GB DDR4 memory banks with error correction code (ECC) (2 banks)
• 1Gb Mb (128 MB) Flash

Interfaces

• PCIe x8 Gen3 electrical, x16 mechanical
• USB 2.0 interface for debug and programming of FPGA and Flash memory
• 1X QSFP with 4X 10GbE or 40GbE support
• Low-profile (½ length, ½ height)
• Standard and low-profile bracket

Software

• Acceleration Stack for Intel Xeon CPU with FPGAs
• FPGA Interface Manager installed

Design Entry Tools

• Intel Quartus® Prime Pro Edition software
• Acceleration Stack for Intel Xeon CPU with FPGAs
• Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL

You can read more about this on the Intel product page.