Intel launches Stratix 10: Altera FPGA combined with Arm CPU, 14nm manufacturing

Oct. 20, 2016, Oct. 20, 2016 – 

When Intel bought Altera last year, there was speculation on how we'd see future FPGA products fit within Intel's existing product lines. Intel has previously stated it intends to offer a Xeon processor with an integrated FPGA, but we've yet to hear any concrete talk about what that product will look like. The new Stratix 10 family does contain a microprocessor - but it's an Arm-based design, not an Intel chip.

That doesn't mean Intel DNA isn't baked into the new FPGA, however. According to Intel's PR, Stratix 10 offers double the core performance, up to 70% lower power, up to 1TBps of memory bandwidth provided courtesy of HBM2 (that's 128GB/s) and up to 10TFLOPS of single-precision floating point performance. Arm capabilities are provided by a quad-core Cortex-A53.

According to Intel, Stratix 10 has been fundamentally re-architected to deliver performance that's dramatically better than any competitive solution on the market. The new chip uses "hyper-registers" to reduce routing congestion and to allow for performance tuning without requiring additional adaptive logic modules (ALMs). The chip allows for localized programmable clock trees to reduce skew and timing uncertainty. This improvement was apparently "a key feature that allows the HyperFlex architecture to reach 2X performance."

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