From PC World: Intel will ship its first Xeon server chip with a programmable FPGA from Altera in the first quarter next year, some 18 months after announcing work on the product.
FPGAs, or field programmable gate arrays, are specialty chips used to accelerate specific workloads. With Moore's Law starting to slow, some see the programmable chips as an important way to accelerate tasks like machine learning and data analytics in an energy-efficient way.
Intel announced in June last year that it was working on a Xeon part with an integrated FPGA, and on Wednesday the head of its data center group, Diane Bryant, said the chip will arrive in the first quarter next year.
"We’ll be shipping it to the largest cloud service providers in Q1 so they can begin tuning their algorithms," she said during an on-stage interview at the Structure conference in San Francisco.
It's taken a while to get the chip to market, but the pace of work will probably increase now that Intel is buying its FPGA partner, Altera, for almost $17 billion. It announced the deal in June and said it would close in six to nine months.
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