Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX), the leader in adaptive and intelligent computing, today announced that it has shipped Versal™ AI Core series and Versal Prime series devices to multiple tier one customers through the company’s early access program. Versal is the industry’s first adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP), a revolutionary new category of heterogeneous compute devices with capabilities that far exceed those of conventional CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs.
An ACAP is a highly integrated, multicore, heterogeneous compute platform that can be changed at both the hardware and software levels to dynamically adapt to the needs of a wide range of applications and workloads in data center, automotive, 5G wireless, wired and defense markets. Built from the ground-up to be natively software programmable, the Versal ACAP architecture features a flexible, multi-terabit per-second network-on-chip (NoC). The NoC seamlessly integrates all engines and key interfaces, making the platform available at boot and easily programmed by software developers, data scientists and hardware developers alike. Through a host of tools, software, libraries, IP, middleware, and frameworks, ACAPs enable dynamically customizable accelerated computing solutions through industry-standard design flows.
“Having our first Versal ACAP silicon back from TSMC ahead of schedule and shipping to early access customers is a historic milestone and engineering accomplishment. It is the culmination of many years of software and hardware investments and everything we’ve learned about architectures over the past 35 years,” said Victor Peng, president and CEO of Xilinx. “The Versal ACAP is a major technology disruption and will help spark a new era of heterogeneous compute acceleration for any application and any developer.”
Developed in TSMC’s 7-nanometer process technology, the Versal ACAP portfolio is the first platform to combine software programmability with dynamically configurable domain-specific hardware acceleration and the adaptability to enable businesses to keep up with today’s rapid pace of innovation. A mix of next-generation scalar engines for embedded compute, adaptable engines for FPGA silicon programmability, and intelligent engines for AI inference and advanced signal processing deliver dramatic improvements in raw performance and performance per watt compared to CPU and GPU implementations.
The Versal AI Core series delivers the portfolio’s highest compute and lowest latency, enabling breakthrough AI inference throughput and performance through the AI Engine. The series is optimized for cloud, networking and autonomous technology, offering the highest range of AI and workload acceleration available in the industry. The Versal Prime series is designed for broad applicability across multiple markets and is optimized for connectivity and in-line acceleration of a diverse set of workloads.
Both the Versal AI Core series and Versal Prime series include multiple devices, each with dual-core Arm® Cortex®-A72 application processors, dual-core Arm Cortex-R5F real-time processors, over 2 million logic cells of adaptable hardware, and over 3,000 DSP engines optimized for high-precision floating point and low latency. Versal AI Core devices offer up to 400 AI Engines optimized for AI inference and advanced signal processing workloads.
The Versal portfolio includes four additional series of devices, each uniquely architected to deliver scalability and AI inference capabilities for a host of applications across diverse markets, from cloud and networking to wireless communications, edge computing, and endpoints.
