Xilinx Ships Heterogeneous Chips for AI, 5G
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1334898LONDON — Xilinx has shipped the first Versal devices to select customers as part of its early access program, a milestone for the company’s heterogeneous compute architecture. Versal devices use Xilinx’s adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP), part of the company’s strategy for modern workloads including high speed networking, 5G, and artificial intelligence (AI)
Xilinx has shipped its first Versal ACAP device (Source: Xilinx)
“Having our first Versal ACAP silicon back from TSMC ahead of schedule and shipping to early access customers is a historic milestone and engineering accomplishment,†said Victor Peng, president and CEO of Xilinx, in a statement. “It is the culmination of many years of software and hardware investments and everything we’ve learned about architectures over the past 35 years.â€
Built on TSMC’s 7-nm FinFET process technology, the first devices to ship are from the Versal Prime series (for a variety of applications) and the Versal AI Core series (for acceleration of AI inference workloads). According to Xilinx, the AI Core series can outperform GPUs by 8X on AI inference (based on sub-2ms latency convolutional neural network performance versus Nvidia V100).
“Having our first Versal ACAP silicon back from TSMC ahead of schedule and shipping to early access customers is a historic milestone and engineering accomplishment,†said Victor Peng, president and CEO of Xilinx, in a statement. “It is the culmination of many years of software and hardware investments and everything we’ve learned about architectures over the past 35 years.â€
Built on TSMC’s 7-nm FinFET process technology, the first devices to ship are from the Versal Prime series (for a variety of applications) and the Versal AI Core series (for acceleration of AI inference workloads). According to Xilinx, the AI Core series can outperform GPUs by 8X on AI inference (based on sub-2ms latency convolutional neural network performance versus Nvidia V100).
In an interview with EETimes Europe, Xilinx’s Nick Ni, director of product marketing for AI, software and ecosystem, said that in the AI accelerator market in particular, there is a lot at stake.
“Everybody is betting on something, including [established players] and ASIC startups … we think this is an intelligent bet,†said Ni. “The truth is, nobody has captured the market in AI … it’s just really getting started.
Everyone agrees the hardware will be the bottleneck of mass deployment — whoever gets the hardware right for this moving target workload, which is very hard to design for, [will win the bet].â€
