Intel has begun shipments of the first Intel Agilex field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to early access program customers.

Participants in the early access program include Colorado Engineering Inc., Mantaro Networks, Microsoft and Silicom. These customers are using Agilex FPGAs to develop solutions for networking, 5G and accelerated data analytics.

“The Intel Agilex FPGA product family leverages the breadth of Intel innovation and technology leadership, including architecture, packaging, process technology, developer tools and a fast path to power reduction with eASIC technology. These unmatched assets enable new levels of heterogeneous computing, system integration and processor connectivity and will be the first 10nm FPGA to provide cache-coherent and low latency connectivity to Intel® Xeon processors with the upcoming Compute Express Link,” said Dan McNamara, Intel senior vice president and general manager of the Networking and Custom Logic Group.

Intel says that Agilex FPGAs provide flexibility, significant gains in performance and inherent low latency. Reconfigurable and with reduced power consumption, Intel Agilex FPGAs have computation and high-speed interfacing capabilities that enable the creation of higher bandwidth networks and help deliver real-time actionable insights via accelerated artificial intelligence (AI) and other analytics performed at the edge, in the cloud and throughout the network.

The Intel Agilex family combines several Intel technologies including the second-generation HyperFlex FPGA fabric built on Intel’s 10nm process, and heterogeneous 3D silicon-in-package (SiP) technology based on Intel’s embedded multi-die interconnect bridge (EMIB) technology. This combination of technologies allows Intel to integrate analog, memory, custom computing, custom I/O and Intel eASIC device tiles into a single package along with the FPGA fabric. Intel delivers a custom logic continuum that allows developers to migrate their designs from FPGAs to structured ASICs.

Intel Agilex FPGAs provide new capabilities including:

• Compute Express Link: Industry’s first FPGA to support upcoming Compute Express Link (CXL), a cache and memory coherent interconnect to future Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
• 2nd-generation HyperFlex architecture: Up to 40% higher performance or up to 40% lower total power compared with Intel Strati 10 FPGAs.
• DSP: Only FPGA supporting hardened BFLOAT16, with up to 40 teraflops of digital signal processor (DSP) performance (FP16).
• Peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) Gen 5: The ability to scale for higher bandwidth compared with PCIe Gen 4.
• Transceiver data rates: Support up to 112 Gbps data rates for high-speed networking requirements for 400GE and beyond.
• Advanced memory: Support for current DDR4, and upcoming DDR5, HBM, and Intel Optane™ DC persistent memory.

Design development for Intel Agilex FPGAs is available today via Intel Quartus Prime Design Software.