Agilex™ 5 FPGAs and SoCs Kick Off a New Wave of Innovation, Now Broadly Available

A customer recently shared with me an interesting way they viewed the updated Altera brand:  It’s like a long-time friend who had moved away for a few years but is now back and it’s time to get caught up. 

One of the things customers might want to 'catch up' on is Altera's efforts with regards to AI. It started when early FPGA products included the first basic digital signal processing (DSP) circuits within the FPGA fabric to improve performance for math-based logic, such as Fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) and finite impulse response (FIR) filters. These early enhancements improved general purpose FPGA-based computing but since 2015, our focus has shifted to improving AI capabilities in both silicon and software tools. DSP capabilities have gotten more sophisticated (fixed point, floating point, small and large bit precisions, etc.) and the quantity of available DSPs within a single device, have increased dramatically. Modern FPGAs are now capable of handling complex equations, especially those needed with the introduction of AI. 

This historical reminisce catches us up all the way until today’s news, where the latest Altera FPGA family is now broadly available to any customer who wants it; Agilex™ 5 SoC FPGAs, the first FPGAs infused with AI tensor blocks throughout the FPGA fabric. A short list of features that would be attractive to embedded or intelligent edge applications include: 

For those haven’t heard about Agilex™ 5 devices before today, here is how you can get started: 

1. Learn about the family. 
2. Review technical details.
3. Download FPGA software. Free for anyone wanting access to Agilex™ 5 E-Series devices: 
   • Download Quartus® Prime Pro 
4. Test drive hardware (generally available now, lead-times may apply, via franchised distributors): 
   • Buy Altera development kits or 3rd party boards and SoMs 
     • The initial wave of board/SoM options include 9+ variants, with more coming. 
5. Evaluate AI or embedded options: 
   • Test out the FPGA AI Suite. 
     • Contact Altera sales for limited time introductory pricing. 
   • Utilize 3rd party tools (Arm DS, MathWorks) to design for the new, best-in-class Arm dual-A76 + dual-A55 based SoC subsystem or RISC-V based Nios® V soft IP processors. 

Altera is announcing the Agilex™ 5 family broad availability coincident with Embedded World 2024 because it is one of the key markets this mid-range FPGA family was architected for.  Embedded customers clearly told us they perceive a lack of adequate compute in embedded processors, see a big need to fill security gaps, and want to add AI into their next generation systems. Agilex™ 5 devices can address all these concerns. 

Coming back to our initial topic, AI: GPUs are certainly a popular choice for AI training, but power consumption of GPUs for AI inferencing may be too high for intelligent edge or embedded applications. Instead of adding a separate GPU/AI semiconductor device to an embedded system (resulting in higher cost, more power, more thermal, etc.), why not add the AI function into an FPGA already planned to be used in embedded/edge equipment? For decades, FPGAs have been used in embedded/edge and communication systems for real-time control, IO connectivity, or image/data processing.  

The estimates on Agilex™ 5 device AI performance look good compared to equivalent class competitors. Because the FPGAs new DSP/tensor is implemented in a fine-grained architecture, it provides the FPGA designer the ability to tune for higher performance or lower power consumption, using the minimum amount of FPGA resources for the desired algorithm. 

Agilex™ 5 devices – AI key figures of merit: 

• Tensor neural acceleration performance: Up to 26 / 56 TOPS ² 
• Better performance per power efficiency versus embedded market inference GPUs. 
  • 1.7x higher frames per second per watt ³
• Better raw performance versus other AI targeted FPGAs. 
  • 69% higher frames per second ⁴

There are many great reasons to look at this new family of FPGAs. If you are an architect, AI developer, or FPGA designer for embedded systems, don’t wait. As Mark Twain famously said, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” Don’t believe the marketing hype, try out your ideas in actual hardware, to see what is ‘possible’. 

Agilex™ 5 SoC FPGAs are just the latest phase in our DSP/AI journey. Altera, accelerating innovators. 

Come visit us at Embedded World 2024: Altera booth Hall 5, 5-135 and 5-136. 

Footnotes: 

1. Performance per watt: https://edc.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/performance/benchmarks/agilex-fpga/    
2. Theoretical peak INT8 calculations for the largest density Agilex 5 E-Series or D-Series devices. 
3. 1.7x higher frames per second per watt vs. Nvidia Jetson-class GPUs (AGX Orin) 
4. 69% higher frames per second vs. AMD/Xilinx Versal AI devices (VE2302)