In a bid to take on the use of low-power ARM processors in cloud servers Intel announces it is now selling customisable Xeon-based data centre chips to large customers at the GigaOm Structure conference.
The chip-- specifically the Xeon E5-FPGA-- allows customers to incorporate own software and IP via built-in field-programmable gate array (FPGA). As Intel puts it this allows programming for specific functions and workloads, such as search or video compression.
"That allows end users that have applications that can benefit from acceleration to load their IP and accelerate that algorithm on that FPGA as an offload," Intel says at the conference. "The FPGA has direct access to the Xeon cache hierarchy and system memory."
According to Intel FPGA-based accelerators deliver 10x performance gains, and the integration of FPGA and Xeon processor doubles that via low-latency Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) interface.
Intel does not reveal who is making the FPGAs it uses, but it is interesting to note Chipzilla does have an agreement with FPGA specialist Altera.