Intel’s Network and Custom Logic Group (NCLG) is targeting the high end of the machine-learning and custom accelerated computing market with its latest offering, the PAC D5005 (Fig. 1). It can handle applications such as video transcoding for streaming multimedia applications. And it will provide higher throughput for applications like network security than the company’s current offering, the Arria 10 PAC.
1. The PAC D5005 tackles the high end while the current Arria 10 PAC handles the low end.
The air-cooled, dual-slot, ¾-length, full-height card is built around Intel’s Stratix 10 SX FPGA (Fig. 2). The board has a pair of 100-Gb Ethernet ports accessible via QSFP28 interfaces. The Stratix 10 SX has 2.8 million logic elements that can access up to 8 GB of DDR4 RDIMMs with ECC support. The board-management controller is an Intel MAX 10 FPGA. The board is rated at 215 W TDP.
2. The dual-slot D5005 x16 PCIe card is built around a Stratix 10 SX FPGA. It has a pair of 100-Gb Ethernet interfaces and 8 GB of DDR4 RDIMMs.
The PAC D5005 delivers more than twice the performance of the single-slot Arria 10 PAC. It bests the NVIDIA V100 board in terms of TOPS/W by a factor of six.
Intel’s new board is available on Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) Proliant DL380 GEN 10 servers. The 2U dual-processor server supports 16 GB of NVDIMMs. The HPE Intelligent System Tuning support helps balance performance and workloads.
The platform is designed for the cloud and enterprise servers. It’s supported by VMware’s vSphere 6.7 Update 1. Rack management and orchestration frameworks can be integrated.
