Xilinx, expanded its Alveo data center accelerator card portfolio with the launch of the Alveo U50 that is industry’s first low profile adaptable accelerator with PCIe Gen 4 support, designed to supercharge a broad range of critical compute, network and storage workloads, all on one reconfigurable platform.
The Alveo U50 provides customers with a programmable low profile and low-power accelerator platform built for scale-out architectures and domain-specific acceleration of any server deployment, on-premise, in the cloud and at the edge. To meet the challenges of emerging dynamic workloads such as cloud microservices, Alveo U50 delivers between 10-20x improvements in throughput, latency and power efficiency. For accelerated networking and storage workloads, the U50 card helps developers identify and eliminate latency and data movement bottlenecks by moving compute closer to the data.
Powered by the Xilinx UltraScale+ architecture, the Alveo U50 card is the first in the Alveo portfolio to be packaged in a half-height, half-length form factor and low 75-Watt power envelope. The card features high-bandwidth memory (HBM2), 100 gigabit per second (100 Gbps) networking connectivity, and support for the PCIe Gen 4 and CCIX interconnects.
By fitting into standard PCIe server slots and using one-third the power, the Alveo U50 significantly expands the scope in which adaptable acceleration can be deployed to unlock dramatic throughput and latency improvements for demanding compute, network and storage workloads.
The 8GB of HBM2 delivers over 400 Gbps data transfer speeds and the QSFP ports provide up to 100 Gbps network connectivity. The high-speed networking I/O also supports advanced applications like NVMe-oF solutions (NVM Express over Fabrics), disaggregated computational storage and specialized financial services applications.
Alveo U50 accelerated solutions deliver significant customer value across a range of applications. From machine learning inference, video transcoding and data analytics to computational storage, electronic trading and financial risk modeling, the Alveo U50 brings programmability, flexibility, and high throughput and low latency performance advantages to any server deployment. Unlike fixed architecture alternatives, the software and hardware programmability of the Alveo U50 allows customers to meet ever-changing demands and optimize application performance as workloads and algorithms continue to evolve.
“Ever-growing demands on the data center are pushing existing infrastructure to its limit, driving the need for adaptable solutions that can optimize performance across a broad range of workloads and extend the lifecycle of existing infrastructure, ultimately reducing TCO,” said Salil Raje, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Group, at Xilinx. “The new Alveo U50 brings an optimized form factor and unprecedented performance and adaptability to data center workloads, and we continue to build out solution stacks with a growing ecosystem of application partners to deliver previously unthinkable capabilities to a range of industries.”
The company also claimed that AMD’s EPYC processor, IBM’s Power Systems and Western Digital will support Alveo U50 and it will be available for sampling now with OEM system qualifications in process, while the general availability is scheduled later in the year.
