Faced with constraints such as time, budget, and power, many industries including data centers, telecommunications, and financial services are turning to FPGAs as flexible, programmable, and efficient solutions. Intel has introduced new FPGA products supporting PCIe 5.0 and Compute Express Link (CXL) capabilities.

Intel announced on the 25th that it is mass producing and shipping Intel Agilex 7 with R-tiles.

Intel's Programmable Solutions Group said the Agilex-7 is the first FPGA to offer PCIe 5.0 and Compute Express Link (CXL) capabilities, as well as hard IP supporting these interfaces.

Companies said they can use Agilex-7 with R-Tile to seamlessly connect FPGAs with processors such as 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with the highest bandwidth processor interfaces to accelerate target data center and high-performance computing workloads.

Additionally, the configurable and scalable architecture of Agilex7 allows rapid, large-scale deployment of tailored technologies based on specific requirements and hardware speeds, reducing overall design costs and development processes, and accelerating execution to improve data center performance. He emphasized that it can contribute to optimization.

According to Intel, the Agilex7 FPGA with R-Tile delivers leading technology capabilities, including twice the PCIe 5.0 bandwidth and four times the CXL bandwidth per port over competitive products, and a white paper published by Meta and the University of Michigan reports that adding FPGAs with CXL memory to a server based on 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors while simultaneously utilizing efficient Transparent Page Placement (TPP) can improve Linux performance by up to 18 percent.

Additionally, UnifabriX demonstrated CXL-enabled smart memory nodes on several benchmarks, including improving HPCG benchmark scores by 28% while using twice as many 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors for high-performance computing workloads.

“Customers are demanding cutting-edge technologies that not only efficiently manage today’s workloads, but also provide the scalability and individuality they need to switch capabilities as needed,” said Shannon Poulin, Intel vice president and general manager of the Programmable Solutions Group. “Agilex products deliver programmable innovations that deliver the speed, performance and capabilities our customers need, while providing flexibility and resiliency for the future.”

He said, for example, that customers are leveraging R-tiles supporting PCIe 5.0 and CXL to accelerate software and data analytics, reducing processing times from hours to minutes.