Altera Starts Production Shipments of Agilex 7 FPGA M-Series Highest Memory Bandwidth FPGA

Altera Corporation, an Intel Corp. company, announced production shipments of its Agilex 7 FPGA M-Series, an industry’s 1st high-end, high-density FPGA to feature integrated high bandwidth memory and support for DDR5 and LPDDR5 memory technologies.

Offering over 3.8 million logic elements, Agilex 7 FPGA M-Series is optimized for applications that demand the highest performance and highest memory bandwidth, including AI, data centers, next-gen firewalls, 5G communications infrastructure and 8K broadcast equipment.

As data traffic continues to increase exponentially due to the growth of AI, cloud computing and video streaming services, the demand for higher memory bandwidth, increased capacity, and improved power efficiency has never been greater. Agilex 7 FPGA M-Series addresses these challenges by offering users high logic densities, a high-performance fabric and a memory interface that accelerates data throughput speeds while reducing memory bottlenecks and latency.

Agilex 7 FPGA M-Series features a hardened memory Network-on-Chip (NoC) interface that delivers the industry’s highest memory bandwidth, up to 1TB/s, using in-package HBM2E and hardened DDR5/LPDDR5 memory controllers. The 2nd-Gen Hyperflex architecture provides over 2X higher fabric performance/watt compared to competing 7nm FPGAs.

Use cases for Agilex 7 FPGA M-Series include:

• Data centers: In today’s cloud data centers, Agilex 7 FPGA M-Series provides high memory bandwidth and a high-performance FPGA fabric for faster processing and more power efficient data handling of GenAI models.
• Networking: In next-gen firewall applications, Agilex 7 FPGA M-Series provides high-performance data paths, deep memory buffers and high-bandwidth connectivity.
• Broadcast equipment: In next-gen 8K ultra high-definition video, Agilex 7 FPGA M-Series delivers the high-bandwidth connectivity to support the transfer of massive amounts of data between the image sensor pipeline and the FPGA.
• Test and measurement equipment: Agilex 7 FPGA M-Series supports the advancement of ‘Gigabit Ethernet technologies’ by enabling the development of next-generation 800GbE test equipment.

One user of Altera’s Agilex 7 FPGA M-series is the AI company, Positron, who selected the FPGA for the TCO benefit it provides.

Regarding Altera’s solution, Thomas Sohmers, CTO and founder, Positron, said, “Agilex 7 M-series enables Positron to utilize a memory-optimized architecture, achieving over 93% bandwidth utilization – far surpassing the typical 10-30% seen in GPU-based systems. This advancement allows us to deliver 3.5 times better performance per dollar and 3.5 times greater power efficiency compared to leading GPUs when running LLM inference workloads such as the Llama3 family and MOE-based reasoning models.”

Deepali Trehan, head, product management and marketing, Altera, said, “The Agilex 7 FPGA M-Series represents a significant leap forward in FPGA technology. By combining HBM memory, DDR5, LPDDR5, and a high-density FPGA fabric, we are empowering our customers to tackle the most demanding memory-intensive workloads with unmatched efficiency and performance.”

Key features of Agilex 7 FPGA M-Series include:

• DDR5 and LPDDR5 support: Hardened controllers support up to 179GB/s, enabling support for latest-gen memory standards, higher bandwidth and lower power.
• In-Package HBM2E memory: Up to 32GB of high-bandwidth memory, providing up to 820GB/s of peak memory bandwidth.
• Network-on-Chip (NoC) functions: High-bandwidth, resource-efficient access to both in-package and on-board memory resources.
• Advanced transceiver capabilities: Hardened Intellectual Property (IP) for PCIe 5.0, Compute Express Link (CXL) 2.0, and 400G Ethernet, with transceivers operating up to 116Gb/s, the highest of any FPGA provider in the industry.

The Altera Agilex 7 FPGA M-Series is in production and shipping to customers WW with an expected lifecycle up to 2035.