An FPGA Acceleration Card is a dedicated, plug-in card that improves the performance of a specific device. In terms of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) configuration, it has to do with the Infrastructure Processing Units (IPUs) dedicated to moving, processing and storing a larger volume of data.
In this article, we talk about the PAC D5005, one of the FPGA acceleration cards by Intel.
What is PAC D5005?
It is an FPGA acceleration card designed by Intel, one of the leading manufacturers of GPUs. The company manufactured the card to aid in the acceleration of compute-intensive applications or workloads.
According to Intel, the PAC D5005 is optimized to be a “high-performance PCI Express (PCIe)-based FPGA acceleration card for data centers, which supports both inline and lookaside acceleration.”
The goal has always been to leverage this infrastructure to accelerate or bolster the speed and performance of devices in the high-compute markets.
The Data Center Opportunities
It is no news that data center is one of the biggest markets in the tech industry. With millions of users and billions of data to process, the market needs to have a higher speed platform that facilitates data transfer.
Intel’s PAC D5005 is optimized to provide this service by offering optimized configurations for the increasing number of workloads across different industries. Worthy of mentioning is that Intel collaborated with Hewlett Packard (HP) to deliver these solutions via the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 servers.
Through that medium, both Intel and HP intend to penetrate the image transcoding, big data and AI inferencing markets with both an increased Return on Investment (ROI) and accelerated time-to-value.
The companies also look at offering these accelerated FPGA solutions in the following (tech) markets:
- Network security
- Streaming analytics
- Financial analysis
Improved Performance
We can expect an all-around improved performance in the PAC D5005, thanks to Intel’s approach to offering a significant increase in the following areas:
- Faster Ethernet via the inclusion of two 100GE ports.
- Up to three times (3x) the number of programmable logics in the previous FPGA PAC.
- Up to four times (4x) the memory of the previous PAC.
Product Advantages of the PAC D5005
Below are some of the benefits of working with the Intel PAC D5005 FPGA PAC.
1. Security Improvements
The PAC D5005 protects both the system and the FPGAs with the Root-of-Trust Service. The service helps to protect the systems from security exploits and attacks targeted at the Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).
The service also enables the enforcement of policies that would prevent the unauthorized access of (third parties) to the flash memory and important interfaces in the circuit board.
The Root-of-Trust service also helps to provide a secure loading of the board updates and authorized workloads on the board.
2. Increased Time-to-Market
Developing the FPGAs with PAC D5005 is faster, all thanks to the acceleration stack, development tools and the acceleration libraries. The combination provides the FPGA developers with the right tools needed for the circuit boards’ configuration.
Conclusion
As an FPGA developer, you get to use the PAC D5005 to enable code reusing across multiple Intel FPGA platforms, cut down on development time and use a common interface for both the accelerator functions and application developments.
