Intel ships FPGA-powered accelerator cards for Xeon servers

Intel’s FPGA-powered accelerator cards are featured in a new range of Xeon processor-based servers coming from major OEM customers, including Dell EMC and Fujitsu.

Both Dell EMC and Fujitsu will incorporate a complete Intel hardware and software stack in their individual offerings, consisting of Intel Programmable Acceleration Cards with Arria 10 GX FPGA and the Intel Acceleration Stack for Intel Xeon Scalable processor with FPGAs.

“We are beginning our adoption of Intel Programmable Acceleration Card with Arria 10 GX FPGA with PRIMERGY server and engaging our priority customers. The FPGA acceleration benefits enable operators to tackle the opex constraints while still achieving scale, performance and adaptability,” said Kenichi Sakai, corporate executive officer and head of Data Center Platform Business Unit of Fujitsu.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R640, R740 and R740XD servers incorporating Intel FPGA acceleration are now available for volume deployment with more to come.

“We are at the horizon of a new era of data center computing as Dell EMC and Fujitsu put the power and flexibility of Intel FPGAs in mainstream server products,” said Reynette Au, vice president of marketing for the Intel Programmable Solutions Group. “We’re enabling our customers and partners to create a rich set of high-performance solutions at scale by delivering the benefits of hardware performance, all in a software development environment.”

Intel first announced sampling of the card in October 2017 with the promise to make it commercially available in 1H 2018.