Intel is to
offer two new ways for third-party hardware vendors to plug into its processors,
which could enable a new market of application accelerators.
Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president at Intel's Digital Enterprise Group,
told delegates at
Intel
Developer Forum that the firm has allowed
Xilinx and
Altera to
create so-called
Field
Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) that connect directly to a processor's
front side bus.
An FPGA chip is designed to perform one specific task, for instance to speed
up floating point calculations. Having direct access to the front side bus is
expected to boost these devices' performance.
The announcement is a direct response to the support that
AMD has been
building for its Torenza
open socket design that allows third-party vendors to create co-processors
that have access to the same resources as the CPU.
AMD claimed last week that its standard had attracted interest from
enterprise systems vendors including
IBM,
Sun
Microsystems,
Dell and
HP.
Roger Kay, founder of analyst firm
Endpoint
Technologies, said that Intel's move is mostly a "competitive response" to
AMD's Torenza, as illustrated by the fact that only two hardware vendors are
allowed access.
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