Intel Demonstrates Broadwell-EP-Xeon With Integrated FPGA

Intel demonstrated a Xeon E5 processor with an integrated Altera Arria 10-fpga at the SC16 conference in Salt Lake City. Intel also announced a separate accelerator card based on the Arria 10-fpga.

It is an on-package combination of the fpga and the Xeon E5 chip and the processor is based on the Broadwell EP architecture, Intel confirmed to Servethehome. The fpga and processor are interconnected and sit together under the ihs. Intel is said to have sent the first Xeon E5 test chips with FPGAs to customers. The processor with accelerator ran a recommendation engine on Apache Spark.

The addition of an fpga allows developers to deploy a programmable chip to accelerate specific data center workloads. It is expected that more and more data centers will deploy systems with FPGAs, because of the advantages in terms of speed and consumption. The integration is one of the first results of the acquisition of Altera by Intel.

At the same time, Intel announced a PCI-e card built around the Altera Arria 10 at the conference. The Intel Deep Learning Inference Accelerator is intended for computational tasks in the field of image recognition and should be available next year.