BittWare announces PCIe 5.0/CXL accelerators based on Intel® Agilex™ M-Series and I-Series FPGAs

BittWare has announced three new Compute Express Link (CXL)-capable accelerator cards with PCIe 5.0 support based on Intel® Agilex™ M-Series and I-Series FPGAs. The three cards are:

• The IA-860m accelerator card based on an Intel Agilex M-Series FPGA, which integrates high-speed HBM2e DRAM into the FPGA package
• The IA-640i and IA-440i accelerator cards based on Intel Agilex I-Series FPGAs

The PCIe 5.0 host interfaces on these accelerator cards support twice the host bandwidth and throughput compared with other accelerator cards with PCIe 4.0 interfaces so these cards can handle workloads that demand the highest possible performance.

The full-sized BittWare IA-860m FPGA accelerator card uses Intel Agilex M-Series FPGA’s internal SRAM, along with 16 or 32 gigabytes of integrated HBM2e DRAM and as much as 32 gigabytes of on-board, DDR5 SDRAM to create an optimal memory hierarchy capable of running high-throughput and memory-intensive workloads. The IA-860m card also uses the Intel Agilex FPGA’s comprehensive I/O features to implement three QSFP-DD transceiver module cages, each capable of supporting 400G (4× 100G or 8x 10/25/50G) Ethernet, a CXL-capable PCIe 5.0 x16 host interface, and two MCIO expansion ports. Each MCIO port on the IA-860m FPGA accelerator card supports two PCIe 4.0 x4 PCIe root complexes. The IA-860m accelerator card can be programmed using Intel oneAPI and Data Parallel C++ (DPC++), which provides developers with an abstracted development flow to dramatically simplify code re-use across multiple heterogeneous computing architectures.

The single-width BittWare IA-640i FPGA accelerator card¾designed for accelerating data center, networking, and edge-computing workloads¾employs the on-board Intel Agilex I-Series FPGA’s I/O facilities to implement one QSFP-DD transceiver module cage capable of supporting 400G (4× 100G or 8x 10/25/50G) Ethernet, a CXL-capable PCIe 5.0 x16 host interface, and one MCIO expansion port. The half-height BittWare IA-440i FPGA accelerator card’s design is similar to the IA-640i FPGA accelerator card with one QSFP-DD transceiver module cage capable of supporting 400G (4× 100G or 8x 10/25/50G) Ethernet, a CXL-capable PCIe 5.0 x16 host interface, but with no MCIO ports. BittWare provides application reference designs for these three new accelerator cards.

These three BittWare FPGA accelerator cards are among the very first to incorporate CXL capabilities. All three of these FPGA-based accelerator cards support the CXL protocol developed for the Intel Agilex M-Series and I-Series FPGAs, so these cards can be used as coherent hardware accelerators within data center servers, networks, and edge servers. Coherent acceleration further boosts performance in servers equipped with CPUs that support the CXL protocol. The just-released Intel® Quartus® Prime Software suite version 22.3 now supports the PCIe 5.0 and CXL features of these three cards. Adding CXL features to these three new BittWare acceleration cards requires the purchase and activation of a CXL IP license from either Intel or a 3^rd-party IP supplier.

Learn more about the IA-860m FPGA accelerator card based on an Intel Agilex M-Series FPGA.

Learn more about the IA-640i and IA-440i accelerator cards based on Intel Agilex I-Series FPGAs.

For additional information about these three FPGA-based accelerators, contact BittWare.