People are all poised to benefit from mass production of Xilinx's Versal

Xilinx released the first details of its next-generation Everest architecture, now called Versal.

At a time when Moore’s law is slowing, Versal is Xilinx’s effort to “step up its game to be a peer of Intel and Nvidia,” giants three to 20+ times its size, said analyst Kevin Krewell of Tirias Research.

Initial 7nm Versal products include as:

    Dual-core Cortex-A72
    Dual-core Cortex-R5
    Multi-terabit/s NoC
    Management controller to handle boot up
    DSPs and/or vector arrays

They support interfaces such as:

    DDR4-4300 and LPDDR4-4266
    112G serdes in Premium versions in 2020
    High bandwidth memory in late 2021
    PCIe Gen 4 x16
    CCIX and AXI-DMA
    MIPI D-PHY

Xilinx defined six families of Versal chips, two shipping late next year called Prime and AI Core. Three more will follow in 2020—AI Edge, AI RF and Premium—with a version supporting HBM expected in late 2021.

The Prime family comes in nine configurations and has the broadest range of target markets. The AI Core version has five members, and Xilinx detailed all 14 variants on its Web site.

The chips span 5-150W in power consumption. They will support 0.7, 0.78 and 0.88V. Prices will align with traditional Xilinx FPGAs, although they are likely to get more competitive at the low end and for hot use cases such as self-driving cars.

“In ADAS and small power envelopes we will go up against the likes of [Intel] Mobileye in performance/dollar,” said a Xilinx representative.

Xilinx will mass roll out its next-generation 7nm FPGA chips in 2019, and TSMC and other Xilinx supply chain partners including Chunghwa Precision Test Tech (CHPT) and Answer Technology are gearing up for the chips' mass production, according to industry sources.

As a sales agent for Xilinx product lines, Answer Technology has seen growing application of FPGA chips to AI, cloud computing, edge computing and blockchain sectors. In particular, the new FPGA chips boast highly integrated and flexible designs that can meet customer requirement for high-performance computing (HPC) at low power consumption, and the new high-end Ultrascale +FPGA network real-time video transmission solutions have won orders from global web giants.