There have been many announcements about what would be the next generation Intel Xeon platform with integrated FPGA, also on this blog.

Now Intel has finally announced that they are shipping their Xeon 6138P Gold with integrated FPGA accelerator to selected customers.

The Intel Xeon 6138P includes ane Arria10 GX 1150 FPGA core, with up to 160Gbps of I/O bandwidth and a cache-coherent interface for tightly coupled acceleration. The Arria FPGA has its own cache and connects with the Xeon processor via Intel’s ultra fast UPI (Ultra Path Interconnect). The data sharing between processor and FPGA do not need DMA access, reducing programming complexity.

According Anandtech, “The Xeon Scalable Gold 6138 is already an existing CPU, and the x86 silicon on the 6138P looks to be identical between the two parts: A 20C/40T CPU, with a 2GHz base clock, 3.7GHz boost, with 6 channels of DDR4 support. The PCIe lane count is different — 48 lanes on the base 6138 compared with 32 lanes on the 6138P — but this almost certainly means that 16 of those PCIe 3.0 lanes have been diverted for bandwidth for the FPGA.”

According to Intel, the integrated processor Xeon delivers a 3.2x throughput improvement at half the latency compared to an FPGA-less Xeon device.

In the announcement, Intel has stated that “Fujitsu, a lead partner, plans to deliver systems based on the Intel® Xeon® processor with integrated FPGA and Intel’s OVS reference design. They are making the Intel® virtual switching reference design even more robust for the networking environment through their reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) with performance monitoring and debug assisting functions. This solution is being demonstrated this week at the Fujitsu Forum in Tokyo.”

For more information:

(Intel) Intel Processors and FPGAs—Better Together