Xilinx introduces Alveo U50 to expand its Alveo data center accelerator card portfolio

     Xilinx announced the launch of the Alveo U50, further expanding its Alveo data center accelerator card portfolio. The Alveo U50 card is the industry's first lightweight adaptive compute acceleration card that supports fourth-generation PCIe Gen 4 and is specifically designed to scale a variety of critical compute, network, and storage workloads, all on the same reconfigurable FPGA platform.

     Alveo U50 provides customers with a small, low-power programmable accelerator platform, built for different sizes, different types of system architectures and domain-specific acceleration applications, for any type of server deployment, including on-premises, cloud and edge. To meet the challenges of emerging workloads such as ever-changing cloud microservices, Alveo U50 achieves a significant 10-20x improvement in terms of greater throughput, lower latency and higher power efficiency. For accelerating network and storage workloads, the U50 card helps developers identify and break bottlenecks in latency and data movement by bringing data closer to computation.

     The Alveo U50 card features the Xilinx UltraScale+™ architecture, pioneering the use of a half-tall, half-length form factor and low envelope power consumption of less than 75 watts. The card supports high bandwidth memory (HBM2), 100Gbps network connectivity, and supports fourth-generation PCIe and CCIX interconnection standards. By supporting standard PCIe server slots and using only the power consumption of the existing Alveo card 13, the Alveo U50 significantly expands the range of adaptive acceleration technology that can be deployed, delivering unprecedented high throughput and low latency for demanding compute, networking and storage workloads.

     The 8GB HBM2 provides data transfer rates of more than 400 Gbps, and the QSFP port provides a network connection of up to 100 Gbps per second. In addition, high-speed network IO supports a variety of cutting-edge applications, such as NVMe-oF solutions (NVM Express over Fabrics™), decoupled Compute Storage (Computionial Storage) and professional financial services applications

     From machine learning inference, video transcoding and data analysis to computational storage, to electronic transactions and financial risk modeling, Alveo U50 can extend the flexibility, high throughput and low latency performance benefits of the Alveo platform to any server deployment. Unlike other solutions with a fixed architecture, Alveo U50's software and hardware programmable capabilities enable customers to meet changing needs and optimize application performance at any time while workloads and algorithms evolve.

     Salil Raje, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Xilinx's Data Center Business Group, said: "The never-ending demand for data centers is pushing the performance of existing data center infrastructure to the ceiling, and the industry needs flexible solutions to optimize the performance of workloads across a wide range of applications to extend the life cycle of existing infrastructure and ultimately reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO)." The new Alveo U50 brings optimized form factor for data center workloads, as well as unprecedented performance and flexibility. We will continue to work with our growing network of application partners to improve the ecosystem and build a solution stack that delivers previously unimaginable capabilities to many industries."