Altera demos industry’s first QPI 1.1 FPGA Home Agent for enhanced server capabilities

USA & CHINA: Altera Corp. announced the industry’s first demonstration of an FPGA Home Agent enabled by the Intel QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) protocol 1.1.

Connecting to Intel’s Sandy Bridge XEON processors, the demonstration leverages an Altera Stratix V FPGA configured as the Home Agent, and it supports both the Caching Agent and Home Agent in a Pactron Vigor Development Platform. This solution is ideal for designers of low-latency signal-processing, packet processing and embedded applications, such as high-frequency trading and big data that needhigher computation performance-per-watt than traditional CPU configurations can deliver.

Altera is demonstrating its QPI 1.1 intellectual property (IP) solution to support both the Caching Agent and Home Agent in a Pactron Vigor Development Platform at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) Beijing, April 10-11, in Altera’s booth #E120.

QPI is the only way to coherently connect to an Intel server processor. The Altera StratixV FPGA transceiver has been qualified to support the Intel QPI electrical specification at 8 Gbps. Developers of low-latency, high-bandwidth systems looking to extend the flexible shared memory model that Intel uses for x86 programming can now efficiently integrate a Stratix V FPGA into their systems.

The Home Agent demo addresses 32 GB of memory on the motherboard connected to the socket with support for two channels connecting to four 8 GB RDIMMs.

“Our QPI 1.1 solution provides developers of data centers and high-performance computing applications a platform to significantly increase their compute performance while reducing system cost and power,” said David Gamba, director of the compute and storage product line at Altera. “FPGAs deliver a highly effective, efficient way to speed the processing of large data sets through parallel processing and accelerated data transfers.”

Pactron designs and develops comprehensive and robust embedded systems that provide storage, wireless, mobile, networked, audio video, and internet-connectivity for OEM partners. The company delivers integrated hardware and software platforms that are incorporated into end to end solutions, providing its customers minimized risk, accelerated time-to-market, reduced development costs, and enhanced design architecture.

The Altera Stratix V QPI 1.1 IP solution is available now. The Pactron Vigor Development Platform is available now from Pactron.