Following the recent announcement of its new Bonanza Mine (opens in new tab) chips, Intel is back with a brand new chip well-suited to mining for cryptocurrency (opens in new tab) in addition to improving performance in a wide range of applications like network virtualization.
The chip giant's new Agilex M-Series FPGA is built on Intel 7 process (opens in new tab) technology and aims to accelerate a wide range of tasks from high performance computing (HPC) to storage and networking according to a new press release (opens in new tab). This is because many of these applications put enormous demands on memory including capacity, bandwidth, latency and power efficiency.
Intel Agilex M-Series FPGAs are also the industry's highest memory bandwidth FPGAs (opens in new tab) with in-package HBM DRAM. However, this new chip incorporates several other new functional innovations and features to improve high-speed networking, computing and memory allocation for networks, cloud and embedded edge applications.
In fact, Intel says that its Agilex M-Series FPGAs also provide two times the fabric performance per watt when compared to competitive 7nm FPGAs like the Xilinx Versal FPGA (opens in new tab) whose parent company is now owned by AMD (opens in new tab).
Intel Agilex M-Series FPGAs
In addition to being the first member of the Intel Agilex device family to provide HMB2e memory, the company's new Agilex M-Series FPGAS also include hardened controllers for other state-of-the-art memory technologies like DDR4, DDR5 and LPDDR5.
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Director of product marketing at Intel, Sabrina Gomex provided further insight in a blog post (opens in new tab) on the importance of memory in the company's new FPGAs, saying:
“All Intel Agilex FPGAs, including members of the M-Series, include fast, on-chip SRAM in the form of MLAB and M20K blocks. These SRAMs are integrated into the FPGA’s programmable-logic fabric and are therefore located immediately adjacent to the logic that will exchange data with these memories. Some Intel Agilex M-Series FPGAs also incorporate in-package HBM in the form of HBM2e memory stacks, managed by hardened memory controllers.”
Intel's upcoming Agilex M-Series FPGAs will be able to process enormous data loads as they support PCI Express Gen5 (opens in new tab), Compute Express Link, 400G Ethernet and serial transceivers operating at up to 116 Gbps.
We'll likely hear more from the chipmaker once its new Agilex M-Series FPGAs get closer to their launch hopefully later this year.
- We've also rounded up the best workstations (opens in new tab) and the best mining rigs (opens in new tab)
Via The Register (opens in new tab)
