Xilinx Boosts Data Center Performance Without Replacing Hardware
With an enhanced family of configurable SmartNICs
AI video analytics platform, AAT, launches in the App Store and more.


From networking, AI analytics, and financial trading, today's most demanding and complex applications demand low latency and real-time performance. However, achieving this level of performance entails significant costs and hardware development time.

On the 3rd, Xilinx held an online meeting and announced the following products that respond to the latest data center requirements: the 'Alveo™ SN1000' Smart Network Interface Card (SmartNIC) family, the 'Smart World' AI video analytics platform, the Accelerated Algorithmic Trading (AAT) reference design, and the Xilinx App Store.

“These new products and solutions are designed to enable software developers to rapidly develop and deploy software-defined, hardware-accelerated applications based on Alveo accelerators,” said Ed Wright, director of outbound marketing at Xilinx, during a press conference that day.

The Alveo SN1000 is a family of compasable SmartNICs that can offload all functions through software-defined hardware acceleration. Developers can optimize networking performance by directly offloading CPU-intensive tasks through an open architecture that accelerates a wide range of network functions to line speed.

Software developers can use the Vitis™ networking platform and high-level programming languages like P4, C, and C++ to develop network functions, protocols, and applications that run on SmartNIC hardware. This allows companies to implement network functions that handle new protocols and applications without replacing hardware.

The SN1000 accelerator provides software-defined hardware acceleration for networking, security, and storage offloads, including Open vSwitch (OVS) and virtualization acceleration (Virtio.net). Security offloads include IPsec, kTLS, SSL/TLS, and accelerated storage applications such as Virtio.blk, TCP-based NVMe™, and Ceph, as well as compression/encryption services.

Based on the Xilinx 16nm UltraScale+™ architecture, the SN1000 SmartNIC family is powered by low-latency Xilinx XCU26 FPGAs and 16-core Arm® processors. It provides 10/25/100Gb/s connectivity with dual QSFP ports to support high small packet performance, and also supports PCIe Gen 4 interconnect.

The first model in the product family, the SN1022, is available in a Full Height, Half Length (FHHL) form factor with a 75W Power Envelope (PE) and is scheduled for general availability this month.

◇ Smart World, reducing latency in AI video applications

Powered by the Xilinx Video Machine Learning Streaming Server, the Xilinx Smart World Platform accelerates entire applications and supports multiple neural networks on a single Alveo accelerator with deterministic pipeline latency of less than 100ms.

Smart World Ecosystem solutions include: Aupera, a turnkey smart city and smart retail solution; Mipsology, a set of tools for migrating existing AI applications from GPU-based architectures to the Alveo platform and providing high-performance AI inference acceleration in a plug-and-play manner; and DeepAI, an Alveo accelerator-based solution that provides edge AI training capabilities 10x better than GPU-based solutions.

◇ The Vitis development platform supports sub-microsecond trading performance.

Achieving sub-microsecond latency in algorithmic trading typically requires expensive and time-consuming hardware development.

The Vitis development platform enables software developers to quickly and affordably deliver sub-microsecond trading performance without hardware development, enabling accelerated algorithmic trading (AAT).ing) includes reference designs.

Implemented on Alveo accelerator cards, AAT is provided in a modular design that includes all the components necessary for an end-to-end, low-latency trading solution. Each module can be customized to meet a company's specific needs using C and C++ on the Vitis platform.

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

◇ Data center accelerator functions can now be adjusted using a smartphone.

We've launched an app store offering ready-to-deploy accelerated applications, ranging from smart world AI video analytics to anti-money laundering and live video transcoding. These pre-built, containerized applications allow you to easily evaluate, purchase, and deploy accelerated applications in minutes.

Meanwhile, Xilinx will showcase other acceleration solutions, along with the solutions introduced today, at the online technology event, Xilinx Adapt: Data Center, to be held from March 24th to 25th, together with its ecosystem partners.