BittWare, a Molex company, has unveiled the IA-840F, the company’s first Intel Agilex-based FPGA card designed to deliver significant performance-per-watt improvements for next-generation data centre, networking and edge compute workloads. Agilex FPGAs deliver up to 40% higher performance or up to 40% lower power, depending on application requirements. BittWare maximized I/O features using the Agilex chip’s unique tiling architecture with dual QSFP-DDs (4× 100G), PCIe Gen4 x16, and three MCIO expansion ports for diverse applications. BittWare also announced support for Intel oneAPI, which enables an abstracted development flow for dramatically simplified code re-use across multiple architectures.
“Modern data center workloads are incredibly diverse requiring customers to implement a mix of scalar, vector, matrix and spatial architectures,” said Craig Petrie, vice president of marketing for BittWare. “The IA-840F ensures that customers can quickly and easily exploit the advanced features of the Intel Agilex FPGA. For those customers who prefer to develop FPGA applications at an abstracted level, we are including support for oneAPI. This new unified software programming environment allows customers to program the Agilex FPGA from a single code base with native high-level language performance across architectures.”
The new IA-84F offers enterprise-class features and capabilities, including:
- Support for Intel oneAPI unified software programming environment
- HDL developer toolkit: API, PCIe drivers, application example designs and diagnostic self-test
- Sophisticated Board Management Controller (BMC)
- Choice of thermal cooling options: passive, active or liquid
- Multiple expansion port for additional PCIe, storage or network I/O
To streamline cross-architecture development, oneAPI includes a direct programming language, Data Parallel C++, and a set of libraries for API-based programming. Data Parallel C++ is based on C++ and incorporates SYCL from the Khronos Group. This dramatically simplifies code re-use across multiple architectures while facilitating custom tuning for accelerators.
“Intel Agilex FPGAs and cross platform tools including the oneAPI toolkit are leading the way to enable easier access to these newest FPGAs and their tremendous capabilities – including eASIC integration, HBM integration, BFLOAT16, optimized tensor compute blocks, Compute Express Link (CXL), and 112 Gbps transceiver data rates for high speed 1Ghz compute and 400Gbps+ connectivity solutions”, comments Patrick Dorsey – VP Product, Programmable Solutions Group at Intel. “The highly customizable and heterogenous Agilex platform and oneAPI tools enable products like the new IA-840F accelerator card from BittWare to drive innovation from the edge to the cloud.”
First IA-840F card shipments are scheduled to begin Q2 2021. Customers can purchase the new card as a pre-integrated DELL or HPE server from the BittWare TeraBox range with a comprehensive three-year warranty.
