Xilinx Alveo adaptable accelerator cards
As technology evolves at a tremendous pace, so does the demand for high-performance computing. In the everlasting pursuit for higher processing speed and faster throughput, developers shifted their focus from using a single, ultra-fast computing device such as a CPU, to multi-parallel computing platforms capable of distributing the workload across an array of application-specific processing cores. Indeed, these platforms enabled significant processing acceleration and allowed many new technologies to emerge.
However, fixed-function, instruction-based hardware is built for specific tasks and is not optimized for unstructured algorithms and data processing. With the introduction of emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its subsets, it became apparent that the application-specific hardware is unable to adapt to rapidly evolving software algorithms. Also, with the demise of Moore's law, both power consumption and the chip size became critical factors for a wide range of applications, from cloud to edge. To maintain an optimal level of synchronization between hardware capabilities and software requirements, a significantly different approach is required.
Based on the advanced 16 nm UltraScale+™ field-programmable architecture, Xilinx Alveo accelerator cards deliver unparalleled flexibility and processing power through the deployment of domain-specific architectures, enabling tremendous acceleration for memory-bound, compute-intensive applications. The Xilinx Alveo accelerator card series can be customized for different workloads at a hardware level, thereby ensuring optimal performance and power consumption, while consequently avoiding unnecessary delays associated with the traditional fixed-function hardware implementation. Xilinx Alveo accelerator cards are the most efficient processing accelerators available to date, delivering the highest performance per watt, which makes them a perfect choice for deployment both in the cloud and in on-premises data centers.
The Xilinx Alveo accelerator card series offers an adaptive and scalable solution for a broad range of different workloads through reconfigurable logic, including machine learning inference, quantitative finance, video transcoding, database search and analytics, and more. Starting with the power-efficient, passively cooled Alveo U50 model, packaged in an efficient 75-watt, small form factor, and armed with 100 GbE networking, PCIe Gen4, and HBM2, Xilinx offers solutions for many different use cases. With the capability to quickly adapt to continuously evolving workload algorithms, Xilinx Alveo accelerator cards offer a future-proof concept, reducing the total ownership cost.
Supported by Vitis™, a unified software platform that features a comprehensive core development kit, a rich set of hardware-accelerated open-source libraries, industry-leading domain-specific development environments, and a growing ecosystem of third-party libraries and pre-built applications, Xilinx Alveo Acceleration Cards allow the widest range of developers to build their own custom hardware-accelerated applications, using familiar high-level frameworks.
Xilinx Alveo U200/U250 are adaptable accelerator cards designed for more demanding workloads. These cards can be used for optimized workload acceleration of many different applications that require high data throughput and low processing latency, including machine learning inference, video transcoding, database search and analytics, genomics, and similar highly demanding workloads. Based on the programmable 16nm Ultrascale+™, Alveo U200/Alveo U250 accelerator cards bring adaptable and customizable hardware acceleration with up to 90x performance increase over the fastest fixed-function solutions available up to date.
