New Release of the SDAccel Development Environment Accelerates Data Center Applications with Expanded Ecosystem of Platforms, Libraries, and Design Services

SAN JOSE, Calif., May 26, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Xilinx, Inc. XLNX today announced the 2015.1 release of the SDAccel™ development environment for OpenCL™ framework, C, and C++. The SDAccel development environment is a member of the SDx™ family of development environments for systems and software engineers, enabling up to 25X better performance/watt for data center application acceleration leveraging FPGAs. This new release enhances the SDAccel integrated development environment (IDE), extends OpenCL standard compliance, and features an expanded ecosystem of SDAccel development environment-certified Alliance Members providing platforms, libraries, and design services.

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SDAccel Development Environment Enhancements

The SDAccel development environment 2015.1 release provides new ease-of-use enhancements to the Eclipse-based SDAccel IDE including new debug and profiling features to accelerate the development and deployment of OpenCL, C, and C++ kernels. In addition, the release expands on SDAccel development environment Khronos standard compliance with support for a new OpenCL Installable Client Driver (ICD). With the ICD extension, multiple implementations of OpenCL can co-exist on the same system, enabling applications developers to select real-time between CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs for run time acceleration and power savings.

"Bitfusion maximizes performance of existing data center applications through a combination of hardware accelerators, unique software abstractions and libraries. While we enable 'plug and play' acceleration, we also depend heavily on the underlying vendor hardware and tools to deliver high levels of performance," said Subbu Rama, CEO of Bitfusion.io, Inc. "As users of the Xilinx® Kintex® UltraScale™ FPGAs and the SDAccel development environment, we have been happy with the evolution of the environment and the great support provided by Xilinx to demonstrate OpenCL FPGA acceleration for applications in bioinformatics, scientific computing, search, computer vision, and media encoding."

Expanded Ecosystem for Platforms, Libraries, and Design Services Providers

Building on the SDAccel development environment-certified ecosystem announced in November 2014, Xilinx has welcomed new Alliance members offering development boards, market-specific libraries, and design services. New development boards include the Xilinx® Kintex® UltraScale™ KCU105 Evaluation Kit, the Micron Pico Computing SB-850 board with support for Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC), the Alpha Data ADM-PCIE-KU3 board and the 4DSP CES820 commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) compact embedded system.

New and updated Xilinx optimized libraries include OpenCV, BLAS, and machine learning deep neural network (DNN) libraries from Auviz Systems. Additionally, machine learning libraries are also available from new Alliance member, ArrayFire.

"ArrayFire is known for its 'blazing fast' software library for GPU computing. Just a few lines of code from the ArrayFire libraries replaces dozens of lines of raw code, saving valuable time and lowering development costs." said John Melonakos, CEO of ArrayFire. "We have partnered with Xilinx to leverage our domain expertise with the SDAccel development environment to now offer a machine learning library and design services for data center FPGA-based OpenCL application acceleration."

In addition to accelerating end application development of algorithms, libraries and FPGA-based kernels, Xilinx formed a global ecosystem of design services Alliance Members providing design teams around the world with the ability to leverage FPGA-based acceleration of their OpenCL, C and C++ applications. New design services members include ArrayFire, Cluster Technology Limited, Impulse Accelerated Technologies, Instigate Design, Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), and MulticoreWare, Inc.

Availability

To learn more about the SDAccel development environment, visit www.xilinx.com/sdaccel where you will find new QuickTake video tutorials, documentation and links to the SDAccel development environment-certified Alliance members. To access the capabilities of the SDAccel development environment, please contact your local sales representative.

About SDx

SDx™ is a family of development environments for systems and software engineers. SDx enables developers with little or no FPGA expertise to use high level programming languages to leverage the power of programmable hardware with industry standard processors on or off chip. To learn more visit www.xilinx.com/sdx.

About Xilinx

Xilinx is the world's leading provider of All Programmable FPGAs, SoCs and 3D ICs. These industry-leading devices are coupled with a next-generation design environment and IP to serve a broad range of customer needs, from programmable logic to programmable systems integration. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com.

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© Copyright 2015 Xilinx, Inc. Xilinx, the Xilinx logo, Artix, ISE, Kintex, Spartan, Virtex, Vivado, Zynq, and other designated brands included herein are trademarks of Xilinx in the United States and other countries. OpenCL and the OpenCL logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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SOURCE Xilinx, Inc.