7nm Xilinx Versal ACAP Shipping to Customers on EAP

This morning Xilinx is announcing that it has started to ship its new 7nm product to early access program customers. The Xilinx Versal is what the company calls an adaptive compute acceleration platform, or ACAP. The company says it has shipped two variants, the Xilinx Versal Prime and Versal AI Core products to multiple tier 1 customers.

7nm Xilinx Versal ACAP Shipping to Customers on EAP

Xilinx has a new strategy beyond the typical FPGA. The new Xilinx Versal ACAP is designed to have multiple heterogeneous components. This can include Arm CPU cores, FPGA logic elements, DSP engines, I/O, and even AI acceleration onboard. The Xilinx Versal Prime series is considered the mid-range series of the company’s first generation ACAP product line.

One of the big bets Xilinx is making with this generation is in AI and AI inferencing. The company has specific logic blocks called the “AI Engine” that accelerates AI inferencing without having to go back to other logic. The company is betting on an “AI everywhere” future, and the AI Engines are a step in that direction.

If you want to read more about the Xilinx Versal Prime and Xilinx Versal AI Core product lines, here are STH articles on them:

• Xilinx Versal Prime Series ACAP for Mainstream Applications
• Xilinx Versal AI Core ACAP For AI Inferencing

Final Words

Overall, this is a big accomplishment for Xilinx. Some of its competitors have seen delays in their newer generation parts. Also, by moving early to TSMC 7nm, the company gets density and power consumption benefits of a newer process node.

Shipping Versal today means that its next-generation programmable products are getting into the hands of customers that are evaluating their use for data centers, edge inferencing, and even 5G networks early. We should hear more about these products as they ship in higher volumes over the coming quarters.