Silicon Cube , using Intel FPGA Arria10 SoC FPGA
Development of NewTypeMind, a deep learning and computation / storage server solution .

Intel's Programmable Solutions Group, and SiliconCube, an Intel FPGA DSN Partner, announced the development of NewTypeMind, a solution for deep learning and compute/storage server systems, utilizing the Arria10 SoC FPGA. The board offers significant power savings, making it particularly well-suited for data center applications sensitive to system power consumption and space savings.

The biggest advantage of NewTypeMind, based on the Arria10 SoC FPGA, is its standalone operation, powered solely by the FPGA solution, without the need for a separate PC. This significantly reduces power consumption, operating at one-tenth the power consumed by a conventional PC. Therefore, four NewTypeMind boards can be installed in the same space as one PC system, making it suitable for data centers where system power consumption and space are major issues.

Additionally, NewTypeMind boasts a large memory capacity of 64GB and a floating-point processing capacity of 1.5GFLOPS, making it ideal as a computational server solution for processing deep learning algorithms that perform large-scale calculations, such as AlphaGo. In particular, machine learning algorithms handle large-scale mathematical operations, and the Aria10 SoC is optimized for such application environments with its 1,688 built-in hardware-based floating-point units.

Meanwhile, the Aria10 SoC can automate high-level design using OpenCL (Open Computing Language), significantly reducing the development time for high-performance computing applications. OpenCL, in particular, has a C-like structure, making it easily accessible even to designers unfamiliar with HDL-based development. Furthermore, up to four separate DDR4 DIMM memory slots are provided to store the large amounts of data required to execute algorithms implemented with OpenCL, with a maximum capacity of 64GB. Intel FPGAs have already demonstrated image processing performance exceeding 600 images per second using the CNN ImageNet algorithm using Aria10.

It is also suitable for use in network server solutions because it supports an ultra-high-speed optical interface. Two optical communication ports using SFP are provided to enable high-speed data transmission and reception required for large-capacity processing.

The Aria10 SoC incorporates a 1.5GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 as hard IP, enabling independent system operation unlike conventional FPGAs. Based on this, NewTypeMind can build a server system solely using NewTypeMind in a rack, achieving over four times the integration density of a PC-based system. The operating system is ported to Linux, and it has a separate 2Gbyte DDR4 memory for Linux.

Silicon Cube is developing various computational server applications using NewTypeMind.

Key features of NewTypeMind:
• OpenCL compiler support
• Linux operating system
• 1.5GHz dual-core Cortex-A9
• 2Gbyte DDR4 SDRAM for ARM
• Four 2400Mbps DDR4 DIMM slots (up to 64Gbyte)
• Two 10Gbps SFP Ethernet interfaces
• 1,688 hardwired single-precision floating point multipliers/adders
• 1.5GFLOPS(Floating Point Performance)
• 3.7GMACS(Fixed Point Performance)
• 42Mbit memory block
• mSD interface
• eMMC
• USB 2.0 host interface
• RJ45 type 1Gbps Ethernet interface
• PCIe GEN3 x8