Intel Seeking to Host FPGAs for Low Latency

Intel is looking to house third-party field programmable gate arrays, developed to power low-latency applications in the financial markets, in slots on the cards carrying its Nehalem processors.

Intel, like a number of the major players in IT, is casting covetous eyes over the low-latency market, which has by and large been the preserve of smaller, specialist shops until now, be it on the hardware or software side. Other companies have made acquisitions, such as IBM's purchase of feed handler vendor InfoDyne earlier this year, or indeed the acquisition of Wombat by the New York Stock Exchange back in January, but Intel is adopting a different approach.

Intel's QuickAssist family of accelerator technologies promotes a front side bus attachment for accelerator modules, which in the financial markets context would comprise the specific field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) developed by some of the specialist companies like Xilinx, Altera, Nallatech or Solace. Rather than buying a FPGA vendor, QuickAssist enables it to play host to any of them.

Thus Intel hopes to gain market share more rapidly, leveraging its brand and reputation as an industry heavyweight, both to attract potential partners and to appeal to customers in the financial markets. Nvidia, another major name in semiconductors but in the graphics processing unit (GPU) space, also has ambitions in this area with its Cuda technology, which is an environment for application developers to harness its multi-core, parallel processors. In Intel's favor here are: the fact that it can accelerate input/output (I/O) with code already embedded in its silicon; the cooperative approach it is adopting to existing players offering FPGAs, and the fact that it is a large company that can position itself as a dependable partner for the long term.

The rationale for this move is that, while a lot of the innovation in technology starts life in FPGAs - with their developers striking deals with software vendors in the space to turbo-charge their products, such as Solace's recent announcement with Tibco for the latter's Rendezvous Appliance - Intel now wants to get into this market and feels it has features in its Intel architecture, in particular its I/O Acceleration Technology, which is code that resides on its silicon, that can bring benefits in addition to what the FPGA can do.

The semiconductor giant is making a play for the market in low-latency infrastructure, to which end it offers its two Low Latency Labs in the UK, where potential partners can go to test their applications on its silicon and where FPGA vendors are able to test their products in QuickAssist deployments on Intel cards.

Intel evidently wants to create pull-through from independent software vendors which develop the applications sitting on the FPGAs, as well as from the end customers themselves. The question is whether the FPGA vendors, in looking at a QuickAssist deployment, will see it as getting a leg up or as sleeping with a potential competitor with a much larger marketing budget.

Rik Turner



Source: Datamonitor


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