Episode 263: Intel's Agilex FPGA; Dell EMC Demos AI Benchmark

Tiffany, This Week in HPC, we had a lot of news from Intel in a previous episode of This Week in HPC, but we didn't get to one of the big parts of the announcement, which was a new FPGA that Intel is calling Agilex.

Yeah, that's right.

So coming off of Intel's big launch event earlier this month, focusing on Cascade Lake and the Optane Persistent Memory, which we covered, there was also the new FPGA family.

It's first built on 10 nanometer Agile X, and Intel is touting this as the first Intel-built FPGA.

And I think by that, they just mean that it was developed since the 2015 Altera acquisition.

Right.

We have to assume that this is essentially a continuation of Altera's development path, their development line, but that this Agilex processor or FPGA was essentially conceived or they started working on it after the acquisition, those Altera people carrying it forward.

So in that sense, it's an all Intel FPGA, but it carries the Altera technology path forward.

Right, right.

So- Just to cover the basics of this, which our enterprise AI managing editor, Doug Black, has covered, Agilex introduces a number of new technologies, the first being the Compute Express Link.

That's the CXL.

So that's Intel, a consortium that Intel got started, an interconnect spec that goes up against the other interconnect consortiums, the ones we know, OpenCAPI and C6 and Gen Z.

So CXL, the Intel-backed acronym, is a cache and a memory coherent interconnect for future Intel Xeon scalable processors.

And Intel says it's the first, this is a, The first FPGA to support Compute Express Link, which is a little funny.

Yeah,

it's a little bit silly.

I mean, here's this new consortium that Intel's backed.

And then, oh, our processor is the first one in it.

The whole point of having a consortium is that you want lots of things following it, right? That's the point of having a competing standard.

And the people who are involved in CXL – I should say the companies involved in CXL – are the cast of characters we would expect here.

It's Intel plus a lot of their closely partnered server vendors and also notable hyperscale companies, but leaves out companies that they compete with directly like AMD or IBM or NVIDIA.

Although I was surprised to see that Mellanox is included on the list.

Whether that'll change based on NVIDIA's acquisition of Mellanox is yet to be seen.

Right, right.

So moving along to the other specs, Agilex employs the second-gen HyperFlex architecture, which Intel is saying makes it possible to get 40% higher performance or up to 40% lower total power compared with the Stratix 10 FPGAs.