Another Silicon Valley bellwether just made the jump to 7nm semiconductor process technology and this time the cutting-edge chip tech is being employed on new breed of SoC (System On Chip) that can adapt to all kinds of compute and machine learning applications. Xilinx is well known for programmable logic-based (FPGA) solutions that can incorporate Arm CPU cores and other special function engines, for anything from edge devices to the data center and cloud. However, today the company is announcing early customer sampling of Versal, a new kind of chip technology that the company calls “The World’s First ACAP,” or Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform.
The technology brings integration of not only standard processing engines like ARM cores, and other basic functional blocks like memory controllers and PCI Express Gen 4 interfaces, but also DSP engines, up to 600G Ethernet and engines for AI workload processing like inferencing. All of this technology is then coupled with a Xilinx Adaptable (FPGA) Engine and linked up on a high speed interconnect the company calls the NOC (Network On Chip), which is actually a multi-terabit on-chip fabric. A platform management controller then allows configuration, bring-up and on-the-fly reconfiguration of the Versal adaptable engines that work in concert with rest of the processing blocks. It certainly sounds like bleeding-edge chip technology and indeed Xilinx is one of the first to market with a processing platform of this kind.
“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. It is the culmination of many years of software and hardware investments and everything we’ve learned about architectures over the past 35 years,” said Victor Peng, president and CEO of Xilinx. “The Versal ACAP is a major technology disruption and will help spark a new era of heterogeneous compute acceleration for any application and any developer.”
The top-end of the new Xilinx line-up is Versal AI Core that has peak engine throughput of up to 133 TOPs INT8 and 33 TOPs INT16 for inferencing and other AI workloads. These engines are comprised of 1 GHz VLIW/SIMD Vector cores, which are purpose-built for fine-grained, highly parallel processing. Xilinx representatives note that, “The AI Engines are not something we have licensed from a third party, they are an array of vector processors with tightly coupled memory that are hardware adaptable and software programmable and have been developed by Xilinx.”
Also on board, the family of chips can be configured with robust DSP engines, a dual-core Arm-A72 and dual-core Arm Cortex-R5 complex, a PCIe Gen 4 X16 interface, 4 PCIe Gen 4 X8 interfaces, the previously mentioned multirate Ethernet MACs, DDR4 memory controllers and up to 32.75Gbps transcievers for high speed I/O. Xilinx’s Versal Prime Series is a more midrange offering targeting a wide range of applications from signal processing to 5G base stations and more.
Xilinx Versal AI Core and Prime series (PDF) are the first offering out of the gate in a family of six in total on the company’s roadmap. In the first half of 2020, however, Xilinx is targeting to deliver Versal AI Edge for low power edge compute applications, Versal AI RF which, as the name suggests, integrates RF functional blocks, Versal HBM with on board HBM2 memory controllers, and AI Prime with 112Gbps SerDes transceiver technology, among other higher-end features.
Xilinx will also deliver a suite of software frameworks, tools and libraries for engineers to design with Versal at a high level of abstraction in C, C++ and Python. Xilinx notes the Versal AI Core and Versal Prime series will be generally available in the second half of 2019, though the company is sampling customers now.
Dave Altavilla serves as Principal Analyst for HotTech Vision And Analysis. HotTech, like all technology analyst firms, provides paid services, research and consulting to many semiconductor manufacturers and system OEMs. Some of the companies in this article may be clients of the firm.
