Seattle, WA (PRWEB) November 07, 2011
Pico Computing announced today the development of the M-505 module, the first board to be released with the new Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA, the worlds first shipping 28nm programmable logic device. The M-505 has been designed to be used in conjunction with Picos current EX-500 PCIe backplane giving users an easy upgrade path.
Kintex-7 FPGAs are the mid-range of Xilinxs new 28nm 7-series families of FPGAs. All three families (Virtex-7, Kintex-7, and Artix-7), uses TSMCs high-performance, low-power (HPL) 28nm process designed for power efficiency. This process delivers a 2x price/performance improvement while consuming 50% less power than previous generation FPGAs. Pico is proud to be early to market with a board running the Kintex-7 series FPGA. The M-505 demonstrates our commitment to staying in the forefront of the industry, said Kelley Dobelstein, Sr. Hardware Engineer for Pico Computing.
Since all 7 series FPGAs leverage Xilinxs unified architecture, user IP investment is protected and migration from Virtex-6 designs is easy. The unified architecture facilitates rapid retargeting within the 7 series. Designs from Virtex-6 FPGAs will migrate easily to the Kintex-7, with similar performance, lower power and reduced price.
“Pico Computing is demonstrating technical leadership with the M-505 by pairing the Kintex-7 with their scalable FPGA board architecture. This is a low-power high-density high performance solution that outperforms many other HPC solutions including multi-core systems for integer applications that involve search and pattern matching operations, said Prasanna Sundararajan, Sr. Staff Systems Architect, HPC, at Xilinx.
The M-505 features a Xilinx Kintex-7 XC7K325T with one DDR3 SODIMM providing up to 12.8 GB/s of local memory bandwidth to the FPGA. Communication to the host is through x8 Gen2 PCIe. There are 34 LVDS and eight GTX transceivers on the M-505. The M-505 can also be configured independent of a host system, as a stand-alone module for embedded applications. The M-505 continues to follow Picos scalable architecture design; up to 6 modules can fit on an EX-500 PCIe backplane, allowing up to 48 FPGAs in Picos SC5 SuperCluster.
Pico Computing will demonstrate its M-505 module at the 2011 Supercomputing Conference (SC11) November 12 – 18, 2011 in Seattle, Washington. Production boards will be available in the 2nd quarter of 2012. Beta program opens Q1 2012.
About Pico Computing
Pico Computing, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, specializes in highly integrated development and deployment platforms based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technologies. Applications for Pico Computing technologies include cryptography, networking, signal processing, bioinformatics, and scientific computing. Pico Computing products are used in embedded systems as well as in military, national security and high performance computing applications. For more information about Pico products and services, visit http://www.picocomputing.com
About Xilinx
Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic solutions. For more information, visit http://www.xilinx.com/
###
