Altera, Intel AI in the Embedded World

At Embedded World, Intel and Altera Announce AI-Friendly FPGA and Edge Products

 

 

Artificial Intelligence is becoming ubiquitous in edge computing sectors such as retail, industrial, and healthcare thanks to new edge-optimized processors and FPGAs.

What’s Fresh: At Embedded World today, Intel and Altera, a division of Intel, unveiled new FPGAs, programmable solutions that are ready for the market, and edge-optimized processors that bring potent AI capabilities to edge computing. These goods will fuel edge devices with AI capabilities that are useful in the retail, healthcare, industrial, automotive, defense, and aerospace sectors.

“With the release of advanced AI capabilities, this next generation of Intel edge-optimized processors and discrete GPUs will enable organizations to more easily integrate AI with computing, media, and graphics workloads. With a wide range of edge-ready hardware and software, Intel’s deep expertise in edge AI spans industries from manufacturing to healthcare, enabling our customers to use AI where it is most needed to improve business outcomes.
–Dan Rodriguez, general manager of the Network and Edge Solutions Group at Intel and corporate vice president

Why It Is Important for AI and Edge: The Importance of This With on-premise edge computing, Intel’s new line of edge-optimized Intel® CoreTM Ultra, Intel® CoreTM, and Intel Atom® processors, along with discrete Intel® ArcTM graphics processing units (GPUs), will advance innovation in artificial intelligence, visual computing, and media processing. AgilexTM 5 FPGAs are designed for a wide range of applications, such as robotics, video, industrial, and medical, and offer best-in-class performance per watt for mid-range applications. For intelligent edge applications, Agilex 5 FPGAs with AI integrated into the fabric provide a high degree of integration, reduced latency, and enhanced processing power.

Today’s developments build on Intel’s commitment to putting AI everywhere by leveraging the new processor series’ built-in AI acceleration to power the upcoming generation of edge devices.
Intel’s Approach to Bringing AI to Embedded Edge Devices: In order to support the upcoming generation of AI-enabled edge devices, Intel offers a wave of edge-optimized processors and GPUs, building on its extensive installed base of over 90,000 edge deployments.

• Intel Core Ultra processors for edge: Combined with an LGA socket that allows for flexibility, these processors combine an LGA socket with an Intel Arc GPU2 and a neural processing unit (NPU)3, providing up to 5.02x better image classification inference performance than 14th Gen Intel® CoreTM desktop processors1. For retail, education, smart city, and industrial customers, the new SoC is made to enable demanding graphics workloads at the edge and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Examples of these workloads include GenAI-enabled smart point-of-sale and kiosk systems in physical stores, interactive whiteboards that improve in-class experiences, and AI vision-enhanced industrial devices for manufacturing and roadside units.

• Intel Core processors for edge: To prioritize system scalability and deployment speed, Intel Core processors combine the GPU capability of 13th Gen Intel® Core® mobile processors with the flexibility of LGA sockets. By utilizing up to three times more graphics execution units, performance hybrid architecture with Intel® Thread Director5, and an LGA socket-based design, this edge-optimized processor series offers up to 2.57x greater graphics performance compared to 13th Gen Intel® CoreTM desktop processors4. This allows customers to enjoy more edge AI and graphics performance without sacrificing hardware setup flexibility.

• The Intel Atom x7000C series of CPUs is designed to provide enterprise networking and telecommunications devices with excellent packet processing throughput. It does this by offering up to eight efficient cores with ramped-up processor base frequency. This gives telecommunications companies the ability to harden networks utilizing Intel security features, enhance packet and control plane processing for OpenSSL/IPSec using native instruction sets, and support the detection of zero-day threats with built-in deep learning inference capabilities.

• CPUs from the Intel Atom® x7000RE Series: The Intel Atom processors x7000RE Series, designed primarily for industrial and manufacturing end users, have up to 32 graphics execution units and integrated deep learning inference capabilities in a ruggedized, power-efficient 6W–12W BGA package. This combination allows for up to 9.83x image classification performance when compared to the Intel Atom processors x6000RE Series6. In order to facilitate Industry 4.0 automation for important use cases like as AI-automated tending, warehousing AMR, in-line visual inspection for quality control, and ruggedized industrial PC situations, the new processor supports fanless designs.

Additionally, the Intel® Arc™ GPU for Edge boosts performance and edge AI capabilities on legacy Intel Core systems as a discrete GPU providing accelerated AI, and media and graphics processing power. Intel Arc GPUs also eliminate vendor lock-in with an open, standards-based software stack to offer choice and flexibility when building high-performance AI applications and solutions.
How Altera’s Portfolio Will Accelerate Customer AI Innovations: Following the FPGA Vision Webcast in February, Altera announced additional updates to its FPGA portfolio, providing flexible solutions to help customers solve their challenges from the cloud to network to the intelligent edge.

“We announced the launch of the new Altera brand with the goal of bringing leading technologies and innovations more quickly to the FPGA market. Today, we are excited about the next phase in our 10-plus year journey delivering flexible AI solutions,” said Sandra Rivera, Altera chief executive officer. “Altera is leading the new FPGAi era by tightly coupling programmability with tensor capabilities and infusing FPGA and AI tools for a best-in-class developer experience. Agilex 5, the first FPGA with AI-infused throughout the fabric, is now broadly available.”

Altera Leads the New Era of FPGAi: Altera helps customers achieve their business goals with new AI capabilities to support high-performance and mid-range FPGA-based solutions, developer usability and workload agility. FPGA AI Suite adds support for Agilex™ 5 SoC FPGAs. The AI tool flow allows developers to use existing and popular AI frameworks, along with the Intel® OpenVINO™ toolkit and the FPGA AI Suite, to create AI intellectual property (IP) blocks and easily drop them into the FPGA design. More information is available at the FPGA AI Suite website.

• Performance per Watt Leader Agilex 5 SoC FPGAs Broadly Available: Agilex 5 devices, with best-in-class AI and up to 2x better performance per watt versus competing 7 nanometer FPGAs7, are designed to deliver high performance with lower power in a modern SoC subsystem with small form factor package options, allowing customers and developers to add AI capability to their products without the need for dedicated accelerators. Geared toward a broad set of embedded applications, Agilex 5 devices and development kits are broadly available with Quartus® Prime software support.

Broad availability also includes support by a large and growing list of ecosystem partners providing additional boards, system-on-modules (SOMs), IP and various value-added services. More information about Agilex 5 devices, including technical details, is available at the Agilex 5 SoC FPGA website.

• Unleash the Power of Agilex 5 E-Series Devices with Quartus Prime Pro Edition S/W Version 24.1: The latest version of Altera’s cutting-edge software is available for download, offering free access to the latest Agilex 5 E-Series SoC FPGAs and selected complementary IP cores. Quartus offers a streamlined experience for an IP-centric design flow, configurable example designs and unprecedented capabilities including a powerful new Agilex 5 SoC subsystem (hard-processor system featuring dual-core Arm Cortex A76, dual-core Arm Cortex A55 processors and various peripherals).

This new SoC subsystem is also supported by third-party tools recently updated to support Agilex 5 devices. More information is available at the Quartus Prime Pro website.

• Portfolio Breadth and Industry-Leading Longevity: Altera continues to deliver a broad portfolio, including industry-leading longevity with selected MAX® and Cyclone® cost- and power-optimized product families’ life cycles extended to 2040 and later, further improving supply chain resilience. Future Agilex™ 3 devices, coming soon, will expand the Agilex portfolio to deliver even greater breadth.

Why It Matters for Altera FPGAs: In an era where technological advancements are integral to staying competitive, Intel’s new edge-optimized processors and solutions deliver the capabilities enterprises need to innovate, be efficient and improve time to market. Altera delivers flexibility and re-programmability to accelerate innovators by providing easy-to-design and easy-to-deploy leadership programmable solutions.

These processors, FPGAs and associated solutions allow enterprises to leverage the tremendous amount of data generated at the edge to deploy sophisticated embedded AI devices across a variety of industries to streamline operations, improve customer satisfaction and incorporate advanced visual workloads.

“The FPGA AI Suite from Altera allowed the Tiami team to rapidly incorporate our IP into an intricate digital signal processing (DSP) pipeline,” said Amitav Mukherjee, CEO at Tiami Networks. “This significantly reduced the time required to integrate AI capabilities with 5G signal processing from an estimated six months to just eight weeks. Our engineering team clearly recognized the value proposition offered by the FPGA in preprocessing wireless signals received from the antenna and performing real-time inference, resulting in a successful demo.”