Xilinx launches the world's highest bandwidth and highest compute density adaptive platform for network and cloud acceleration

     Xilinx, a global leader in adaptive and intelligent computing, announced the introduction of Versal™ Premium, the third product family in the Versal ACAP portfolio. With a highly integrated, power-optimized network core, the Versal Premium family is the industry's most bandwidth and computation-dense adaptive platform. Versal Premium is designed for running the highest bandwidth networks in thermal and space-constrained environments, and for cloud providers who require scalable, flexible application acceleration.

     Versal is the industry's first Adaptive Computing Acceleration Platform (ACAP), a revolutionary new class of heterogeneous computing devices with capabilities far beyond conventional chip architectures. Built from TSMC's 7nm process, the new Versal Premium combines software programmability with dynamically configurable hardware acceleration, prefabricated connectivity and security features to provide a powerful engine for faster time-to-market. The latest product family from Versal ACAP, the Versal Premium family delivers up to three times the throughput of current FPgas, with built-in Ethernet, Interlaken and encryption engines for fast, secure networks. The family delivers twice the compute density of today's deployed mainstream FPgas, while also providing flexibility for the ever-expanding diversity and evolution of cloud and network workloads.

     Kirk Saban, vice president of product and Platform marketing at Xilinx, said: "The Versal Premium family takes ACAP to a new level, enabling single-chip 400G and 800G solutions through the breakthrough integration of network core IP. For next-generation networking and cloud deployments, Versal Premium delivers superior bandwidth and compute density, optimized for acceleration, and significantly reduced total cost of ownership on a scalable platform that software and hardware developers can easily program."

     The Versal Premium series is based on the Versal AI Core and Versal Prime ACAP series, which are currently available. The novelty and uniqueness of Versal Premium is the 112Gbps PAM4 transceiver, hundreds of GbE (Gigabit Ethernet) and Interlaken connectivity, high-speed encryption, and built-in DMA support for both CCIX and CXL supported PCIe® Gen5. Combined with the Vitis™ Unified software platform and the Vivado® Design Suite, Versal Premium offers software and hardware developers a complete solution stack for maximum productivity.

     As 5G networks become operational, network traffic is growing significantly, resulting in increased demand for power-optimized throughput and compute density in existing Spaces and power ranges. To support the industry in meeting this challenge, the Versal Premium family offers scalable, adaptive serial bandwidth of up to 9Tb/s. The approach is to use 112G PAM4 transceivers with integrated network function modules for core network, metropolitan area network and data center interconnection (DCI) infrastructure to triple bandwidth density per port and reduce latency by up to 50%.

     This prefabricated connection enables secure multi-terabit Ethernet with flexible support for a variety of data rates and protocols. The channeled Ethernet core delivers throughput of up to 5Tb/s with minimal board space, while the high-speed encryption engine delivers encrypted line-rate throughput of up to 1.6Tb/s with support for AES-GMM-256/128, MACsec, and IPsec.

     Jim McGregor, principal analyst at TIRIAS Research, said: "As the demand for core networks continues to grow, the need for flexible infrastructure hardware has increased significantly. The new Versal Premium ACAP is built on Xilinx's industry-proven portfolio of high-performance and adaptive products for communications networks. "By integrating power-optimized network core, Versal Premium will provide telecom operators with powerful incentives to build fast and secure networks, while offering flexible acceleration for the new data-intensive workloads that are driving the transformation of networks and data centers."