Xilinx expands its FPGA product portfolio for modern data center and cloud workloads.

Xilinx has announced a range of new data centre products and solutions designed to address the demands of modern infrastructure. These include a new family of Alveo SmartNICs, smart world AI video analytics applications, an accelerated algorithmic trading reference design for sub-microsecond trading, and the Xilinx App Store. According to Salil Raje, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Group at Xilinx, "Data centres are transforming to increase networking bandwidth and optimise for workloads like artificial intelligence and real-time analytics. These complex, compute-intensive and constantly-evolving workloads are pushing existing infrastructure to its limits and driving the need for fully composable, software-defined hardware accelerators that provide the adaptability to optimise today's most demanding applications as well as the flexibility to quickly take on new workloads and protocols, and accelerate them at line rate."

The Xilinx Alveo SN1000 is the industry's first family of composable SmartNICs offering software-defined hardware acceleration for all function offloads. Using the Vitis Networking platform and industry standard, high-level programming languages such as P4, C, and C++, software developers can create network functions, protocols, and applications that operate in hardware on the SmartNIC. The SN1000 SmartNICs provide software-defined hardware acceleration for a wide range of offloads, including Open vSwitch and virtualization acceleration (Virtio.net), security offloads such as IPsec, kTLS and SSL/TLS, and accelerated storage applications including Virtio.blk, NVMe over TCP, Ceph, and compression and crypto services.

Based on the Xilinx 16nm UltraScale+ architecture, the SN1000 family of SmartNICs are powered by the low-latency Xilinx XCU26 FPGA and a 16-core Arm processor. The first model in the family is the SN1022, which delivers dual-QSFP ports for 10/25/100Gb/s connectivity with leading small packet performance and a PCIe Gen 4 interconnect. The SN1022 is offered in a full height, half length form factor in a 75-Watt power envelope and will be generally available in March 2021.

Xilinx is launching an AI video analytics platform powered by the Xilinx Video Machine-learning Streaming Server that delivers whole application acceleration and can support multiple neural networks on a single Alveo accelerator card at deterministic sub-100ms pipeline latency. This represents the industry's lowest TCO for demanding AI video analytics applications. Additionally, Xilinx has introduced an accelerated algorithmic trading reference design that gives software developers the ability to quickly and cost-effectively deliver sub-microsecond trading performance without the need for custom hardware development. The design, implemented on Alveo accelerator cards, provides a modular design that includes all necessary components for an end-to-end, low-latency trading solution, with each module customizable using C and C++ in the Vitis platform. The accelerated algorithmic trading reference design is available at no cost for Alveo accelerator card customers.