BittWare, the leader in Altera-based FPGA COTS boards, announced today that they have begun shipping the industry’s first PCI Express COTS board powered by two of Altera’s 28-nm Stratix® V FPGAs. Designed for high-end applications, the Stratix V provides a high level of system integration and flexibility for I/O, routing and processing.
S5-PCIe-DS (S5PE-DS) is a Gen 3 PCIe x16 card with an extremely flexible memory configuration: eight SODIMM sites enabling up to 64GB of DDR3 SDRAM, up to 4GB of RLDRAM3, and/or up to 256Mb of QDRII+. Providing additional flexibility are four front-panel QSFP+ cages, allowing four 40GigE interfaces (or 16 10GigE), direct to the FPGAs for reduced latency. The two FPGAs are interconnected via eight SerDes transceivers and 36 single-ended signals.
With almost two million logic elements available (952,000 per FPGA), the board is ideal for high-performance computing, and with the reduced latency provided by the network interfaces, ideal for high frequency trading, military / government agency secure communications, and network processing applications.
"This product is by far the most capable FPGA processing board available to date on a PCIe format," stated Jeff Milrod, president and CEO of BittWare. "Our engineers outdid themselves with the clever implementation and adaptation of SODIMMs that has afforded the flexibility for configuring and optimizing memory implementations for a given application and algorithms – no longer do COTS users have to accept ‘close-enough’. Similarly, the off-board I/O options of the S5PE-DS enables low-latency interfacing and integration to an extremely wide range of systems and networks."
Patrick Dorsey, senior director of product marketing at Altera, said: "BittWare once again have proved themselves as an industry leader by bringing to market a PCI Express COTS solution that leverages the industry’s highest performance FPGA.
"The Stratix V FPGAs featured on BittWare’s S5PE-DS board deliver TeraFLOP levels of computing performance with low-power, and fully integrated, multi-gigabit transceivers. The board is unique because it provides users a feature-rich, high-performance PCIe board that, when combined with BittWare’s tools and support, enables easier development of the highest performance programmable applications."
BittWare’s S5PE-DS is available and can be shipped to UK customers today from Sarsen Technology.