by Kevin Morris
Xilinx made a batch of announcements this week aimed at the data center. The company rolled out a new line of programmable network 100Gb/s SmartNIC interface cards, a “SmartWorld AI” video analytics solution, an algorithmic trading framework, and (finally) the Xilinx App Store. Taken together, they make good on Xilinx’s long-term “data center first” strategy. And, viewed on a more macro scale, they represent the execution of a strategy to dramatically grow the FPGA market.
As data rates have skyrocketed, increasing amounts of CPU power have been consumed by networking tasks. The goal of the new SN1000 SmartNIC is to offload those tasks to FPGAs in the network interface card (NIC). The trend toward software-defined networks has given the industry some accepted standards for configuration using P4, C, and C++. Xililnx has piggybacked on those with their Vitis Networking platform to allow software developers to create network functions, pr