Altera Stratix III FPGA-based Intel FSB module

BANGALORE, INDIA: Altera Corp. and XtremeData Inc. today announced availability of the industry’s fastest FPGA/Intel Xeon processor-based front-side bus (FSB) module. Equipped with multiple Altera Stratix III FPGAs and using Intel QuickAssist Technology, the XtremeData XD2000i In-Socket Accelerator (ISA) showcases this powerful 1066 MHz coprocessing solution.

The XD2000i family offers the highest density Stratix III FPGAs in the smallest footprint available in the market. The module uses three FPGAs, one as a bridge to system resources in Intel Xeon processor-based servers, leaving the other two available to run user applications in typically found in military, financial, medical and bioscience markets.

“The fast fabric and I/O capabilities of Stratix III FPGAs are validated in this module by achieving a stable 1,066 MHz FSB speed,” said Dr. Misha Burich, Altera’s senior vice president of research and development. “Stratix III FPGAs also demonstrate the benefits of the digital signal processing architecture for algorithms with floating point data.”

The XD2000i coprocessor modules substantially accelerate applications via parallelization and pipelining, while simultaneously reducing overall system power consumption and latency. In the Stratix III FPGA-based FSB module, a 4X acceleration is expected when running the Monte Carlo Black-Scholes algorithm in double-precision floating point when compared to RapidMind’s graphics processing unit (GPU) single-precision results published earlier this year for one million paths per option.

The XD2000i module also enjoys power, space and memory error correction coding (ECC) advantages over current GPUs: power is sub-60W and the module can be packed densely into a blade form factor. This FPGA coprocessing solution opens up a number of new opportunities in markets where Intel-based servers are presently being used.

The combination of an Intel Xeon 5000 series processor and a Stratix III FPGA coprocessor in the XD2000i module provides customers with the highest performance FSB accelerator available while delivering significant cost, power and space savings.

Intel is enabling tightly coupled, in-socket, FPGA-based accelerators. Placing the Stratix III FPGA-based XD2000i in one of the Intel Xeon processor sockets gives the coprocessor a high-speed link to memory as well as a fast connection to the host processor, without requiring board modifications, thus providing designers with a simple hardware integration path. A new version of the XD2000i module will be available in the third quarter of this year that will work with quad socket boards to provide over 500K logic elements (LEs) and 1,536 multipliers with separate FSB processor interconnect.