Xilinx and IBM First to Double Interconnect Performance for Accelerated Cloud Computing with New PCI Express Standard

Technology milestone between FPGA-based accelerator and POWER CPUs to boost acceleration of data center applications

SAN JOSE, Calif., May 16, 2017 -- Xilinx, Inc. (XLNX) today announced an achievement in PCI Express® Gen4 capability. Together with IBM, the two companies are first to double interconnect performance between an accelerator and CPU through the use of PCI Express Gen4 compared to the existing widely-deployed PCI Express Gen3 standard. Gen4 doubles the bandwidth between CPUs and accelerators to 16 Gbps per lane, thereby accelerating performance in demanding data center applications such as artificial intelligence and data analytics.

Since the introduction of PCI Express in 2003, Xilinx has been a leader in PCI™ interconnect-based solutions, offering PCI Express compliance across its All Programmable FPGA families. Today IBM and Xilinx have achieved Gen4 interoperability between Xilinx® 16nm UltraScale+™ devices and IBM POWER9 processors, demonstrating the first-ever PCIe Gen4 capability in a programmable device.

"It's clear the future of data center computing is going to be built on open standards," said Bradley McCredie, vice president and Fellow at IBM. "This leadership in PCI Express is another reason that POWER architecture is being deployed in modern data centers."

"We believe in open standards," said Ivo Bolsens, CTO at Xilinx. "It's gratifying to see this milestone between our companies that will alleviate significant performance bottlenecks in accelerated computing, particularly for data center computing."

About Xilinx
Xilinx is the leading provider of All Programmable semiconductor products, including FPGAs, SoCs, MPSoCs, RFSoCs, and 3D ICs. Xilinx uniquely enables applications that are both software defined and hardware optimized – powering industry advancements in Cloud Computing, 5G Wireless, Embedded Vision, and Industrial IoT. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com.

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