Intel today announced a new series of field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) designed to support new connectivity protocols and boost the acceleration of workloads in the cloud. The Intel Stratix 10 DX FPGA support Intel’s Ultra Path Interconnect (UPI), which is a first for an FPGA according to Intel; peripheral component interconnect express Gen4 x16; and a new controller for Intel Optane technology.

“The combination of those capabilities as well as our roadmap to the compute express link, or CXL, provides a new level of connectivity, bandwidth, [and] latency capability to our customers,” said Patrick Dorsey, VP of product marketing at Intel’s Network and Custom Logic Group (NCLG).

Intel named VMware as “one of many early access program participants.” Engineering sample forms are shipping broadly today, wider public availability will commence later this month, and production of devices is scheduled for later this year, Dorsey said.

“What we’re able to do now with the FPGA is to expand the system memory available to our customers in a heterogeneous compute environment,” he said. “We’re able to share the memory space coherently between the processor and FPGA and effectively expand the amount of memory available to the application.”

Intel is claiming a series of new capabilities in the Stratix 10 DX FPGA including 10 Gb/s Ethernet, a UPI interface that delivers 37% lower latency, and a theoretical peak transfer rate of 28 Gb/s. The memory controller also supports up to eight Intel Optane DC persistent memory modules per FPGA, according to Intel.

Intel is targeting the new FPGAs across many markets. “We see a place for it in edge — and embedded there’s a real-time low latency capability. We see it in the core network itself, whether that be in NFV or whether in applications like [virtual radio access networks] in wireless. And then in the data center itself.” Dorsey said. Intel also released its first chipsets designed for artificial intelligence last month.

“Data’s the new oil. Data expansion is growing significantly over time so this product along with Intel’s data-centric focus is all about leveraging and creating an opportunity and monetizing that data opportunity out in the market,” he said. “We do that at Intel, and the industry does that, through different types of architectures whether that be [central processing unit], [graphic processing unit], [artificial intelligence] or FPGA.”

This explosion of data, according to Dorsey, portends a need for four key architectures: scaler, vector, matrix, or spatial. FPGA falls under that spatial umbrella, he said.