Advanced Micro Devices officials reportedly are looking into using FPGA accelerators with their Opteron server processors, a move that would advance the company's efforts to gain traction in a data center market dominated by larger rival Intel.

Citing unnamed sources, Bits and Chips, an Italian technology Website, is reporting that AMD is studying integrating field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) with its x86 Opteron CPU to create a customized chip for a particular but unidentified customer. The custom chip also would leverage the capabilities in AMD's upcoming second-generation High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) technology, which would help create high-speed communications between the CPU, FGPA and memory.

Such a move would help AMD in its competition with Intel, which is in the process of buying FPGA-maker Altera for $16.7 billion. Intel has used Altera FPGAs in its Xeon server chips in the past, but buying the company will enable Intel to more tightly integrate the technology into its roadmap. Intel is looking to a number of technologies to help accelerate the performance of its Xeon chips, from its own x86 Xeon Phi co-processors to the Altera FPGAs to its partnership with eASIC to bring application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) to custom Xeons that can be used in data centers and cloud environments.

It also would help AMD address the rapidly changing workload demands found in such areas as the Internet of things (IoT) and cloud environments. Chip makers increasingly are looking for accelerators to boost the performance of their processors and the systems that run on them while holding down power consumption, important concerns for cloud providers and scale-out environments. AMD already offers GPU accelerators.

AMD officials declined to comment on the speculation regarding the FPGAs.

By: DocMemory
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