Xilinx Launches World's Highest Bandwidth, Highest Compute Density Adaptive Platform

Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced the third family in its Versal ACAP portfolio, Versal™ Premium. The Versal Premium family features highly integrated and power-optimized networking cores in the industry’s highest bandwidth, highest compute density, and most adaptable platforms. Versal Premium is designed for the highest bandwidth networks running in thermally and spatially constrained environments, as well as cloud providers that require scalable, adaptable application acceleration. 

Versal Premium, the world’s highest bandwidth, highest computing density, and most adaptable platform

Versal is the industry's first adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP), a revolutionary new category of heterogeneous computing devices with capabilities far beyond conventional chip architectures. Built using TSMC's (TSMC) 7nm process technology, the new Versal Premium combines software programmability with dynamically configurable hardware acceleration, pre-built connectivity and security features to provide a powerful engine for accelerating product time to market. As the latest product series of Versal ACAP, the Versal Premium series can provide up to three times the throughput of current FPGAs, and has built-in Ethernet, Interlaken and encryption engines to create fast and secure networks. The series provides twice the computing density of currently deployed mainstream FPGAs, while also providing flexible adaptability for the continued expansion of diverse and evolving cloud workloads and network workloads. 

"The Versal Premium family takes ACAPs to a new level with breakthrough integration of network hard IP to enable single-chip 400G and 800G solutions," said Kirk Saban, vice president of product and platform marketing at Xilinx. "For next-generation network and cloud deployments, Versal Premium delivers exceptional bandwidth and compute density, optimized acceleration capabilities and significantly reduced total cost of ownership on a scalable platform that is easily programmable by both software and hardware developers."

The Versal Premium series is based on the currently shipping Versal AI Core and Versal Prime ACAP series. What is new and unique about Versal Premium is the 112Gbps PAM4 transceiver, hundreds of GbE (Gigabit Ethernet) and Interlaken connections, high-speed encryption, and built-in DMA, supporting both CCIX and CXL-supported PCIe® Gen5. Together with the Vitis™ unified software platform and the Vivado® Design Suite, Versal Premium provides a complete solution stack for software and hardware developers to achieve maximum productivity.

A faster, more secure network

As 5G networks are put into operation, network traffic has increased significantly, leading to increasing demand for power-optimized throughput and computing density within the existing space and power consumption range. To support the industry in meeting this challenge, the Versal Premium series provides scalable, adaptive serial bandwidth of up to 9Tb/s. The specific method is to use 112G PAM4 transceivers and integrated network function modules for core networks, metropolitan area networks, and data center interconnect (DCI) infrastructure, which will double the bandwidth density per port and reduce latency by up to 50%. 

This pre-engineered connection enables secure multi-terabit Ethernet with flexible support for a variety of data rates and protocols. The channelized Ethernet hard core delivers up to 5Tb/s throughput in a minimal footprint, while the high-speed cryptographic engine delivers up to 1.6Tb/s encrypted line rate throughput and supports AES-GCM-256/128, MACsec and IPsec. 

"As the demands on core networks continue to grow, the need for adaptable infrastructure hardware is increasing accordingly," said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at TIRIAS Research. "The new Versal Premium ACAP builds on Xilinx's proven portfolio of high-performance and adaptable products for communications networks. By integrating power-optimized network cores, it will provide a powerful impetus for telecom operators to build fast and secure networks, while Versal Premium will also provide adaptable acceleration capabilities for new data-intensive workloads that are driving network and data center transformation."

Adaptable cloud acceleration

The Versal Premium series is designed to help hyperscale data center users achieve the highest levels of acceleration for diverse data center workloads. Combining more than 120TB/s of on-chip memory bandwidth with customizable memory tiers reduces data movement and eliminates key bottlenecks, while also enabling embedded integration of pre-engineered connections and hard cores into existing cloud infrastructure. From genomics, data analytics, and video transcoding to AI inference for voice and image recognition, Versal Premium provides a highly integrated cloud-ready platform that delivers breakthrough performance for diverse workloads.  

Availability

The Versal Premium family will begin sampling to early adopters in the first half of 2021. Documentation is available now, and customers can start prototyping immediately with the Versal Prime evaluation kit. Versal Prime devices share many of the same architectural blocks as Versal Premium devices, enabling pin migration to Versal Premium.