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Beijing, China, February 24, 2021 – Xilinx Corporation (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced a series of new data center products and solutions, including the new Alveo SmartNIC series, smart world ( Smart World) AI video analytics application, an accelerated algorithmic trading reference design capable of sub-microsecond transactions, and the Xilinx App Store.

Figure: Xilinx’s new Alveo SN100 SmartNIC series

From networking and AI analytics to financial transactions, today’s most demanding and complex applications demand low latency and real-time performance. The realization of this performance level is always limited by the high cost and long cycle of hardware development. With these new products and solutions, Xilinx is clearing the way for software developers to rapidly build and deploy software-defined, hardware-accelerated applications on Alveo accelerator cards.

“Data centers are transforming to increase network bandwidth and optimize for workloads such as artificial intelligence and real-time analytics,” said Salil Raje, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Xilinx. “These complex, compute-intensive, and continuously evolving Workloads are pushing existing infrastructure to the limits of performance and driving the need for fully composable software-defined hardware accelerators that provide the flexibility to optimize today’s most demanding applications while maintaining It also provides the flexibility to quickly adapt to new workloads and protocols and accelerate them at wire speed.”

New Alveo SN1000 SmartNIC

The Xilinx® Alveo™ SN1000 is the industry’s first composable SmartNIC family that provides software-defined hardware acceleration for various function offloads. The SN1000 SmartNIC directly offloads CPU-intensive tasks to optimize networking performance, and its open architecture accelerates a wide range of networking functions at wire speed.

Using the Vitis™ Networking platform and industry-standard high-level programming languages ​​such as P4, C, and C++, software developers can create network functions, protocols, and applications that run in hardware on SmartNICs. Vitis Networking enables organizations to quickly and easily combine new network functions and adapt existing network functions to handle new protocols and new applications without changing hardware, enabling future-proof investments.

The SN1000 SmartNIC provides software-defined hardware acceleration for many types of networking, security and storage offload, such as Open Virtual Switch (Open vSwitch) and Virtualization Acceleration (Virtio.net). Secure offload includes IPsec, kTLS and SSL/TLS, while accelerated storage applications include Virtio.blk, NVMe™ over TCP, Ceph, and compression and encryption services.

Industry support

“Vmvare is defining hybrid cloud architectures for next-generation applications requiring greater security. SmartNICs will play a key role in the VMware Cloud Foundation architecture, providing customers with a unified management, security and resiliency model across bare metal and virtualized environments, In these environments, the composability of the Xilinx Alveo SN1000 SmartNIC will provide customers with a flexible, integrated, high-quality solution.”

—Lee Caswell, VP of Marketing, Cloud Platform Group, VMware

“Today’s software-defined data centers require flexibility and scalability to meet the changing needs of customer workloads. The innovative composable offload framework of the Xilinx Alveo SN1000 SmartNIC family enables Inspur to rapidly develop and deploy custom jobs load and flexibly adapt to evolving customer needs.”

——Li Pengchong, General Manager of Inspur Network Business Department

The SN1000 SmartNIC family is based on Xilinx’s 16nm UltraScale+™ architecture, featuring a low-latency Xilinx XCU26 FPGA and 16-core Arm® processor. The SN1000 SmartNIC provides dual QSFP ports for 10/25/100Gb/s connectivity with leading small form factor performance and PCIe Gen 4 interconnect. The SN1000 is available in a full-height, half-length form factor and a 75-watt power package.

The Alveo SN1022 SmartNIC will be generally available in March 2021.

Build a smart world with a new AI video analytics platform

Xilinx is introducing an AI video analytics platform with an ecosystem of partner solutions to accelerate the most complex and latency-sensitive AI video inference applications. The Xilinx smart world platform, powered by the Video Machine Learning Streaming Server, provides overall application acceleration and supports multiple neural networks with deterministic sub-100ms pipeline latency on a single Alveo accelerator card. The result is support for demanding AI video analytics applications with the industry’s lowest total cost of ownership (TCO).

Xilinx smart world ecosystem solutions are available now, including:

Aupera combines the company’s intelligent video processing with the Alveo accelerator to provide turnkey smart city and smart retail solutions.

Mipsology provides a set of tools to facilitate the easy migration of existing AI applications from GPU-based architectures to the Alveo platform, with plug-and-play high-performance AI inference acceleration.

DeepAI delivers AI training at the edge with Alveo accelerators, delivering up to 10x performance per cost improvement compared to GPU-based solutions.

Low-latency Electronic trading for all employees

Traditionally, achieving sub-microsecond latency in algorithmic trading required expensive and time-consuming hardware development. An Accelerated Algorithmic Trading (AAT) reference design is now available on the Vitis development platform. It enables software developers to quickly and cost-effectively achieve sub-microsecond transaction performance without developing custom hardware.

AAT is implemented on the Alveo accelerator card. It offers a modular design that includes all the necessary components for an end-to-end low-latency trading solution. Each module can be customized using C and C+ on the Vitis platform to meet the specific needs of each enterprise.

The AAT reference design is now available free of charge to Alveo accelerator card customers.

Xilinx App Store

Xilinx has also launched an app store with many ready-to-deploy accelerated applications ranging from smart world AI video analytics to anti-money laundering and real-time video transcoding. Containerized pre-built applications developed by Xilinx ecosystem partners provide an easy way to evaluate, purchase, and deploy accelerated applications in minutes.