Xilinx Demonstrates FPGA-Based Acceleration Technology for Next-Generation Data Centers at IBM Impact 2014

As a member of the IBM OpenPOWER Foundation, Xilinx delivers industry's first key value store accelerator demo based on the IBM CAPI protocol

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 25, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced it will demonstrate the industry's first key value store acceleration demo based on the IBM CAPI protocol at the IBM Impact 2014 Conference. As a member of the IBM OpenPOWER Foundation, Xilinx is delivering FPGA-based acceleration technologies for use in next-generation data centers and is among the growing open development community dedicated to accelerating innovation using IBM's POWER microprocessor.

Through close collaboration with IBM and the OpenPOWER Foundation, Xilinx is continuing to develop high-performance compute solutions that integrate IBM POWER CPUs using the CAPI protocol with Xilinx® FPGAs. The IBM CAPI protocol enables coherent sharing of memory resources between the FPGA and host thereby reducing development cycles. The Xilinx demonstration is a broadly applicable CAPI-based key value store workload acceleration engine (i.e. Memcached and NoSQL) that delivers significant performance/watt acceleration at substantially lower latency and compliments the OpenCL™ design environment for Xilinx devices. A demonstration of this solution is available in the OpenPOWER booth at the IBM Impact 2014 Conference, April 27-May 1.

"The development model of the OpenPOWER Foundation is one that elicits collaboration and represents a new way in exploiting and innovating around processor technology," says Brad McCredie, OpenPOWER Foundation president and IBM Vice President and Fellow. "With the Power architecture designed for Big Data and Cloud, new OpenPOWER Foundation members like Xilinx, will be able to add their own innovations on top of the technology to create new applications that capitalize on emerging workloads."

"Xilinx is proud to be part of this global consortium bringing a new wave of innovation to next-generation data centers," said Ivo Bolsens, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Xilinx. "Our collective efforts are giving developers more choices for the way data center hardware is developed and deployed. Xilinx solutions are adding to the enhanced and open set of technologies from which designers have to work with."

The OpenPOWER Foundation makes POWER hardware and software available to open development for the first time as well as making POWER IP licensable to others, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform. The consortium will offer open-source POWER firmware, the software that controls basic chip functions. By doing this, IBM and the consortium can offer unprecedented customization in creating new styles of server hardware for a variety of computing workloads.

About Xilinx

Xilinx is the world's leading provider of All Programmable FPGAs, SoCs and 3D ICs. These industry-leading devices are coupled with a next-generation design environment and IP to serve a broad range of customer needs, from programmable logic to programmable systems integration.