Profound Analytics

The Socket 940 FPGA's

Recently two companies have introduced FPGA products that will fit in the AMD socket 940 (Opteron). XtremeData Inc introduced a product based on Altera's Stratix II and DRC Computer based ont he Xilinx Virtex-4.

The benefit of both is to take advantage of HyperTransport interconnect as a low latency bus, pioneered by Cray's XD1 (nee OctigaBay).


There is only minimal data on both web sites, but notwithstanding the complexity of developing for the FPGA, there are some practical issues. The BIOS needs to support initializing the HyperTransport links properly, so likely the numbers of motherboards where these can be plugged into will be limited.

It is an interesting approach, to avoid using the HTX interface or more traditional interfaces like PCI-X ot PCI-Express. One advantge of the socket approach, is already listed by DRC Computer, to take a motherboard designed for 4 processors and populate it with 3 FPGA's and one processor.

AMD has talked about licensing their Coherent HyperTransport (cHT), it is likely that neither of these devices are that closely integrated, at least neither seems to mention that.

It is nice to see this type of innovation, both are facing a bit of an uphill battle as FPGA's are a niche in computing, particularly enterprise computing, but there is growing interest and tools. Products like these will likely continue to increase interest in the product space.

posted by OwtoBahn @ 8:26 PM