Intel will ship its first Xeon chips for servers with integrated field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to increase application performance starting in the first quarter of 2016.
The chipmaker will be sending out the integrated solutions to “the largest cloud providers,” said Intel senior vice president and Data Center Group general manager Diane M. Bryant during an interview with Fortune‘s Stacey Higginbotham at the Structure conference in San Francisco today.
The cloud providers can then tune the FPGAs to accommodate their specific applications, Bryant said.
Bryant did not name specific cloud providers, but it’s reasonable to think the largest one, Amazon Web Services (AWS), as well as Microsoft Azure would be on board for this initiative. Intel as a company and Bryant specifically have worked closely with AWS to ensure the latest chips are available. Microsoft, meanwhile, has experimented with FPGAs to improve the performance of its Bing search engine.
Intel bought one of the two FPGA vendors, Altera, in a landmark acquisition totaling $16.7 billion.
“We can now say that our partner is Altera,” Bryant said.
Intel first announced that it was working on FPGA-Xeon integrated solutions in June 2014.
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