Wednesday, 12 October 2016
CHIPMAKER Intel's Altera unit has unveiled the Stratix 10, a quad-core FPGA that features a 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 with five times the density and twice the performance of Altera's previous generation Stratix V.
The Stratix 10 offers
70 per cent lower power consumption for the same performance and will be
produced on Intel's latest 14nm process technology.
The
device was unveiled by Dan McNamara, corporate vice president and general
manager of the Programmable Solutions Group (PSG) at Intel.
"Stratix
10 combines the benefits of Intel's 14nm tri-gate process technology with a
revolutionary new architecture called HyperFlex to uniquely meet the
performance demands of high-end compute and data-intensive applications ranging
from data centres, network infrastructure, cloud computing and radar and
imaging systems," he said.
The
device is intended for data centre applications and networking infrastructure,
and comes after Intel signed adeal in August with ARM to produce chips based on ARM's
intellectual property in Intel's most advanced chip production facilities.
The
arrangement came after Intel struck a deal in2013 to make 64-bit ARM chips for Altera when it was
designing the Stratix 10.
"FPGAs
are used in the data centre to accelerate the performance of large-scale data
systems. When used as a high-performance, multi-function accelerator in the
data centre, Stratix 10 FPGAs are capable of performing the acceleration and
high-performance networking capabilities," explained McNamara.
The
device is among the first new products that Intel will produce on its own fabs
that incorporate ARM microprocessor technology since offloading the Xscale
business to Marvell in 2006.
Intel
had acquired the Xscale business, then called StrongARM, after buying Digital
Equipment's semiconductor operations in the late 1990s.
Meanwhile,
Intel completed the acquisition ofAltera in December 2015, when CEO BrianKrzanich said: "We will apply Moore's Law to grow today's
FPGA business, and we'll invent new products that make amazing experiences of
the future possible - experiences like autonomous driving and machine
learning."
This
is not the first time that a chip design company has blended memory with
switching fabric. The Xilinx Zynq-7000 is an all-programmable SoC comprising
two 32-bit ARM Cortex-A9 cores, an FPGA and a number of controller cores to
handle Ethernet, USB and other controllers.
Intel-owned
Altera has produced a white paper explaining the technicalintricacies of the Stratix 10. ยต
