Intel PAC with FPGA Stratix 10 SX - an accelerator for large tasks

FPGA Intel Stratix 10 SX / GX , which appeared on sale 2 years ago, became a new word in the field of gate arrays. Made on the minimum at the time 14-nm process technology, they were twice as productive and 70% more efficient than their predecessors. However, to realize all the capabilities of Intel's FPGA, we need the same advanced wrapper. The hardware / software construct released by Intel for using Stratix in host systems is called the Programmable Acceleration Card (PAC) - its latest version was announced in September of this year.

The new PAC is based on the FPGA Intel Stratix 10 SX - the most powerful model from the Stratix 10 family. Let me recall in brief its main characteristics:

• HyperFlex architecture;
• production technology - 14-nm Tri-Gate (FinFET);
• monolithic factory with 5.5 million logical elements;
• up to 96 duplex transceiver channels;
• throughput of transceivers up to 28.3 Gb / s;
• hardware error correction in each channel of the transceiver;
• memory hardware controllers that support DDR4-2666 memory;
• Digital signal processing units (DSP) with total capacity up to 10 TFLOPS, energy efficiency up to 80 GFLOPS / W;
• embedded 4-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 processor with a frequency of up to 1.5 GHz;
• hardware accelerated encryption / decryption of AES-256, SHA-256/384 and ECDSA-256/384;
• hardware support for multi-factor authentication.

As for the Programmable Acceleration Card itself, its functional device is as follows.


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The same in more detail as a table.

Form factor	PCIe Gen3 x16 Full height, 3/4 length, dual slot
Memory	32 GB DDR4 (4x8 GB) ECC
Network interfaces	2X QSFP + up to 100 Gbps
Service interface	USB 2.0 for debugging and programming
Control controller	Intel MAX 10 FPGA Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) • Read temperature and voltage data • Platform Level Data Model (PLDM) • IPMI 2.0
Power management	Intel Enpirion Power Solutions (real-time telemetry and status monitoring)
Software	• Acceleration Stack for Intel Xeon CPU with FPGA • FPGA Interface Manager • Intel Quartus Prime Pro Edition • Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL

The card will be available as part of Intel OEM partners (in particular, Hewlett Packard Enterprise) at the beginning of next year.