Hello E14 FPGA Community,
I have been reading a lot of amazing news about the Xilinx Alveo accelerator cards lately and I am curious to see if anyone here in the community has taken them for a spin yet?
Looks like there are currently a few different options for these cards: U50, U200, U250, and U280 but I have not found an indication of which FPGA devices are actually inside of these cards.
https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/alveo.html
That model number seems to be a relative indicator of performance with U280 being the device at the top:
https://www.xilinx.com/publications/product-briefs/alveo-u280-product-brief.pdf
The U200 and U250 appear to be very similar configurations of the same board since they share a lot of literature with one another:
https://www.xilinx.com/publications/product-briefs/alveo-product-brief.pdf
The latest version is U50 which appears to still be ramping into production:
https://www.xilinx.com/publications/product-briefs/alveo-u50-product-brief-v2.pdf
I see lots of different supported host systems on this list here:
https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/alveo/qualified-servers.html
Definitely a little bit off the beaten path we are used to seeing here for Embedded FPGA applications but it makes sense why these would be targeted to the data center because of the potential to speed up processing speed of all sorts of algorithms.
I would like to know your thoughts on this and whether this would be interesting for new applications/projects if there were more cost-optimized FPGA accelerator cards available for the PC?
-Kevin