Data Center Servers, Accelerators, and Offload Engines
Heterogeneous Servers, Accelerators, and Offload Engines Deliver more Performance while consuming Less Power
Processing big data, mining that data in big databases and making decisions in microseconds is mostly out of the realm of general-purpose CPUs— accelerators and purpose-built compute-offload engines are required to achieve those performance objectives. The high performance parallel processing capabilities inherent to Xilinx All Programmable devices make FPGAs an attractive implementation technology on server motherboards as well as on network interface cards (NIC) when additional processing functions are needed between the network and the CPU.
The Intel® QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) network adapter is an example of one o Xilinx's Smarter Solution components that address the ever changing needs of the next generation data center. Xilinx has developed IP that allows its All Programmable devices to directly attach to the CPU via QPI, which significantly reduces latency on the host interface while providing more bandwidth between CPU and network interface.
Such a network adapter is extremely attractive for data center servers because latency is rapidly becoming the key performance bottleneck in highly parallelized applications. Although in theory ASSPs and ASICs can be built for this purpose, QPI is a proprietary standard owned by Intel and is continuously evolving. Therefore ASIC development is not the best solution. All Programmable devices are a smarter solution for QPI-based design.