Hong Kong, October 30, 2013 — Altera (NASDAQ: ALTR) announced that it is providing a high-performance quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex™-A53 processor system with its Stratix 10 SoC device, manufactured using Intel's 14nm Tri-Gate process. This complements the device's floating-point digital signal processing (DSP) blocks with a high-performance FPGA fabric. Combined with Altera's advanced system-level design tools, including OpenCL, this versatile heterogeneous computing platform delivers excellent adaptability, performance, power efficiency, and design productivity for a wide range of applications, such as data center computing acceleration, radar systems, and communications infrastructure.

The ARM Cortex-A53 processor is the first 64-bit processor used in SoC FPGAs and is an ideal solution for the Stratix 10 SoC by providing outstanding performance, power efficiency, data throughput, and enhanced features. The Cortex-A53 is among the most power-efficient of ARM's application-class processors and is expected to achieve more than six times the data throughput compared to today's highest-performance SoC FPGAs when delivered using the 14nm Tri-Gate process. The Cortex-A53 also provides important features such as virtualization support, 256TB of memory capacity, and error correction code (ECC) for L1 and L2 caches. In addition, the Cortex-A53 core can run in 32-bit mode, allowing it to run without changing the Cortex-A9 operating system and code, thus providing a seamless upgrade path from Altera's 28nm and 20nm SoC FPGAs.

Tom Cronk, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Processors at ARM, said, “We are pleased that Altera has adopted our ultra-low-power 64-bit architecture as the ideal solution for building cutting-edge heterogeneous computing platforms that complement DSP and FPGA processing. The Cortex-A53 processor delivers the industry’s most advanced power efficiency and outstanding performance levels, enabling it to leverage the ARM ecosystem and its innovative software community.”

The Altera Stratix 10 SoC, adopting Intel's 14nm Tri-Gate process and an enhanced high-performance architecture, provides programmable logic performance of over 1GHz, thereby delivering twice the performance of current high-end 28nm FPGA cores.

Linley Gwennap, Senior Analyst at The Linley Group, an embedded market research firm, said, “High-end networking and communications infrastructure is rapidly shifting to heterogeneous computing architectures to achieve maximum system performance and power efficiency. With the Stratix 10 SoC, Altera stands at the cutting edge of the industry in both silicon convergence and support for high-level design tools, providing a heterogeneous computing platform and positioning itself optimally to realize countless possibilities.”

Altera enables software compatibility and allows the use of a common ARM ecosystem for tool and operating system support by unifying its portfolio across three generations of SoCs with ARM processors. Embedded developers can reduce debugging time by using Altera’s SoC Embedded Design Suite (EDS), which includes the ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5™) Altera® Edition toolkit, the industry’s only FPGA adaptive debug tool, and also implement heterogeneous systems using the OpenCL high-level design language by using Altera’s Software Development Kit (SDK) for OpenCL.

Danny Biran, Senior Vice President of Business Strategy and Marketing at Altera, said, “By using the Stratix 10 SoC, designers can utilize a powerful, versatile heterogeneous computing platform, enabling them to innovate products and further accelerate time-to-market. Silicon convergence will continue to be the most suitable solution for enabling complex, high-performance applications.”