Intel Agilex Advantages

The waiting is over. Intel has launched a new product (for a while) named Agilex. Agilex is a brand new series of FPGA from Intel after the long last legendary such as Stratix 10 and Arria 10. Let’s see what profits have brought with Agilex.

Advantages

Intel has enhanced Agilex tons of topics. In the table above are some key-highlights from Agilex.

First of all, when the new electronic product has been announced, one factor that most people keep an eye on is the size of production technology. Agilex is produced on 10 nm technology and combines with SuperFin technology by comparing to Stratix 10 which is produced at 14 nm and Arria 10 at 20 nm. Why are people focusing on the size of production technology? Simple answers are power consumption and amount of logic per area. The small size of technology means lower power consumption and higher amount of logic per area.

Secondly to mention is a PCIe hard IP. A new PCIe Hard IP that supports PCIe Gen 4 with P-Tile and F-Tile. Furthermore, on Agilex High-End devices, users are able to use PCIe up to Gen 5 with R-Tile. It is not over yet. Intel includes advanced features like Bifurcation to its product. What can Bifurcation do? It will not matter if the project does not require high performance storage as NVMe 4 channel. But if it is required. This feature would bring benefits a lot because it supports 4 x 4 lane interface directly to 4 NVMe SSD. Meanwhile, Stratix 10 and Arria 10 can support only up to PCIe Gen 4 and PCIe Gen 3 respectively.

As the internet has become an important factor in daily life. It cannot be ignored Ethernet Hard IP due to the huge improvement of Agilex from Stratix 10 and Arria 10. Stratrix 10 and Arria 10 can support Ethernet Hard IP up to 100G. Let’s look at the detailed difference. Arria 10’s Ethernet Hard IP is the lowest speed in this competition by supporting up to 1G. Stratix 10 is better than Arria 10 by E-Tile of Stratix 10 supports 10G/25G and H-Tile supports 50G/100G. Agilex is the best (for now) by E-Tile supporting 10G/25G/1000G and F-Tile 10G to 400G. Agilex also add HBM2 in case the project need a high memory bandwidth as same as Stratix 10.

Conclusion
Agilex has brought an advancement in many aspects such as upgraded PCIe up to Gen 5 and Ethernet up to 400G and Etc. All those advancements can improve the performance in your design. If you are eager to use those benefits, please see https://youtu.be/jXbABSsMmBg and https://youtu.be/LIWfND96jY8