Significant Leap Forward in Performance and Power Efficiency Reported Using Altera High-end FPGAs with Hard Floating Point DSP Blocks
San Jose, Calif., —February 23, 2015 — Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is using Altera Arria® 10 FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), to achieve compelling performance-per-Watt in data center acceleration based on CNN (convolutional neural network) algorithms. These algorithms are frequently used for image classification, image recognition, and natural language processing. Altera is presenting how FPGAs are accelerating data center search at two key industry events this week: FPGA 2015 ACM/SIGDA in Monterey, California, on February 23 and the Linley Group Data Center Conference in San Jose, California, on February 25.
Microsoft researchers are working on advancing cloud technologies and are using the Arria 10 Developer Kit and engineering samples of Arria 10 FPGAs, which are demonstrating up to 40 GFLOPS-per-Watt, an industry-leading level in data center performance. Also, when compared with GPGPUs, this FPGA performance offers a more than 3X performance-to-power advantage for CNN platforms. This performance is achieved using the open software development language known as OpenCL, or VHDL to code the Arria 10 FPGA and its IEEE754 hard floating point DSP (digital signal processing) blocks.
“We are seeing a significant leap forward in CNN performance and power efficiency with Arria 10 engineering samples and the silicon’s precision hard floating point in the DSP blocks is part of the reason we are seeing compelling results in our research,” said Doug Burger, director, Client and Cloud Apps, Microsoft Research. In a Microsoft blog post, Burger describes some of the challenges facing the data center at an infrastructure level and how by replacing traditional CPUs with reprogrammable FPGAs, Microsoft is addressing these challenges.
“The FPGA has an architectural advantage for neural algorithms with the ability to convolve and do pooling very efficiently with a flexible data path which enables many OpenCL kernels to pass data directly to each other without having to go to external memory,” said Michael Strickland, director of the Compute and Storage Business Unit, Altera. “Arria 10 has an additional architectural advantage of supporting hard floating point for both multiplication and addition – this hard floating point enables more logic and a faster clock speed than traditional FPGA products.”
Altera previously announced that Microsoft is using its Stratix V FPGAs to accelerate search on its innovative Catapult board being deployed in servers in the first Bing data center this year.
About Altera
Altera programmable solutions enable designers of electronic systems to rapidly and cost effectively innovate, differentiate and win in their markets. Altera offers FPGAs, SoCs, CPLDs, and complementary technologies, such as power management, to provide high-value solutions to customers worldwide. Visit www.altera.com.
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Karin Taylor
Altera Corporation
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