Intel has started shipping a new Xeon + integrated FPGA development platform that includes the new Xeon E5 v4 processor, combined with Altera’s Arria 10. The announcement was made today by Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, during the 2016 Intel Developers Forum in Shenzhen, China.

Bryanty said that the combination of algorithm acceleration from the FPGA with the power of Xeon will deliver up to 70% improved performance per watt.

FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) are extremely fast chips that can be reprogrammed to do specific tasks. Intel last year acquired Altera for $16.7 billion as it started thinking beyond CPUs and stressing co-processors for demanding computing tasks.

Compared to GPUs, FPGAs are less flexible and execute tasks based on functionality programmed into a chip. FPGAs can be faster than GPUs on specific tasks, but are also very power hungry.

Intel plans to put FPGAs in cars, robots, servers, supercomputers and IoT devices.

Intel says that eventually, the FPGA technology will be integrated in the same piece of silicon die as the CPU.