This article was initially published on June 18, 2019
Earlier today, we unveiled another significant milestone for Versal, the industry’s first adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP), and we are excited to share the news! In just five short years, we have designed and engineered, taped out and shipped our first Versal ACAP devices, the 7nm Versal AI Core series and Versal Prime series, to multiple tier one customers through our early access program. Understandably, we are extremely proud of this latest ACAP achievement as it is a testament to our commitment to making heterogeneous compute acceleration available to any application and any developer.
The development of the ACAP architecture is Xilinx’s most significant engineering accomplishment since the invention of the FPGA. As we shared at launch last year, an ACAP is a revolutionary new category of heterogenous compute devices. It’s the culmination of over a billion dollars in hardware and software R&D investment and the hard work of more than 1,500 Xilinx engineers applying everything we’ve learned about architectures over the past 35 years.
Versal ACAP is a highly integrated, multicore, heterogeneous compute platform that can be changed at both the hardware and software levels to dynamically adapt to the needs of a wide range of applications and workloads in data center, automotive, 5G wireless, wired and defense markets. Versal ACAP devices can provide up to 10x greater performance and power efficiency for specific applications. Maybe most importantly, the Versal ACAP architecture can be programmed and optimized by software developers, data scientists, and hardware developers alike, through a host of tools, software, libraries, IP, middleware, and frameworks that enable dynamically customizable accelerated computing solutions through industry-standard design flows.
To illustrate the power of the Versal ACAP, we created a video series highlighting many of the unique and innovative features including the AI Engine, and Network-on-Chip. We’re also thrilled to share the first official images of the Versal AI Core series and Versal Prime series devices – they are beauties!
Xilinx kicks off a new era of heterogeneous compute acceleration for any application and any developer with first customer shipments of Versal ACAP, the industry’s first adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP). (Image: Versal™ Prime core series VM1802)
We could go on and on about the capabilities of the new Versal platform and all that we have accomplished over the last five years but, instead, let’s pop the champagne and toast to Versal ACAP. In the name of Kool & The Gang, “Let’s Celebrate!”