This past year has been an exciting one here at Xilinx. Last spring, our recently announced CEO Victor Peng laid out his vision for a new Xilinx, with one of the goals being a transformation from a silicon company to a platform company. Platforms are important for our customers because they can develop and deploy Xilinx-based solutions optimized for key workloads without needing to worry about all the plumbing that goes around it.
Just a few months later, we delivered our first solution in this endeavor with a compute acceleration platform. The Alveo accelerator card couples high-performance FPGA acceleration with PCIe, drivers, memory interfaces, development, and management tools for a plug and play solution. We were just getting started.
Only two weeks later the momentum continued when Samsung announced its SmartSSD, based on Xilinx technology. SmartSSD puts the Xilinx FPGA right on the SSD – moving the compute adjacent to the actual storage component. Samsung SmartSSDs provide the ability to accelerate storage services such as compression, de-duplication and encryption.
And today, we’re proud to highlight another important milestone. We have been hard at work, collaborating with other industry leaders to explore additional ways Xilinx technology can continue to transform the data center. A great example of this is on display this week at the Open Compute Summit in San Jose. Xilinx – in collaboration with Solarflare – is demonstrating an all-FPGA 100G NIC, a single-chip high-performance solution based 100 percent on Xilinx’s FPGA technology. This proof-of-concept demo is an important stepping stone to developing advanced SmartNICs that can run network, storage, and compute acceleration directly on the network interface card, eliminating the need to run these workloads on servers, dramatically improving performance and reducing power consumption.
The demo runs two ports of 100GbE processing over 100 million packets-per-second receive and transmit on a single Xilinx FPGA, all at less than 75 watts. This joint project highlights Solarflare’s expertise as the number one technology supplier in FinTech and is a step toward enabling a broad set of use cases such as inline machine learning, video transcoding and data analytics.
Throughout the past year, we have announced our transformational journey into a platform company, unveiled our Alveo accelerator cards, enabled a smart storage platform solution with Samsung, and now we are demonstrating a networking solution with Solarflare. From compute and storage to networking our priority is to provide our customers with best-in-class approaches. Stay tuned for more exciting news to come!
