Altera Brings FPGA-based Acceleration to IBM Power Systems and Announces Support for OpenPOWER Consortium

Designs Targeting IBM Power CPUs with Altera FPGA-based Accelerators Achieve High Performance and Low Power

San Jose, Calif., November 18, 2013—Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced that the latest release of the company’s SDK for OpenCL supports IBM Power Systems servers as an OpenCL system host. Customers are now able to develop OpenCL code that targets IBM Power Systems CPUs and accelerator boards with Altera FPGAs as a high-performance compute solution. FPGA users can see a 5-20X performance boost over standard CPU based servers for many applications.

Additionally, Altera announced its full support of the OpenPOWER Consortium, an open development alliance that makes the IBM POWER microprocessor available under license to other companies for open collaboration and development. Altera intends to join the Consortium formally as soon as the governing documentation process is complete and membership opens.

The addition of IBM Power Systems strengthens Altera’s FPGA-based heterogeneous computing offering, which also includes support for all other major architectures.

“By combining the industry-leading performance of IBM Power Systems, along with the application acceleration capabilities of FPGAs, the Altera SDK for OpenCL gives customers an unmatched heterogeneous computing environment,” said Jeff Waters, senior vice president and general manager of the military, industrial and compute division at Altera. “The Altera SDK for OpenCL is used by some of the world’s leading developers of high-performance computing systems and data center servers, and with today’s news we are giving these customers a broader choice of computing architectures.”

OpenCL supports a wide range of applications, from embedded and consumer software to high-performance computing solutions, through a high-performance, portable abstraction. By creating an efficient, programmer-friendly interface, OpenCL forms the foundation layer of a parallel computing ecosystem of platform independent tools, middleware and applications. It also greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software. Providing FPGA-based system acceleration with the Altera SDK for OpenCL provides system designers an attractive performance per watt solution when constrained by power and cooling requirements.

“IBM’s collaboration with Altera on OpenCL and support of the IBM Power architecture with the Altera SDK for OpenCL can bring more innovation to address Big Data and cloud computing challenges,” said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group and Integrated Supply Chain. “The heterogeneous computing capabilities of Altera FPGAs and IBM Power CPUs will bring new opportunities for developers to accelerate a wide range of high-performance computing applications across industries.”

Programmers can easily take advantage of the high performance and low power that FPGA solutions offer. The Altera SDK for OpenCL provides an industry-standard open source programming interface. Several FPGA board partners provide off-the-shelf boards that are optimized for Altera devices. A list of Altera Preferred Partner Program partners as well as a variety of design examples that demonstrate the advantages of using FPGAs in high performance systems can be found at www.altera.com/opencl.

Pricing and Availability

The Altera SDK for OpenCL is currently available for download on Altera’s website or through the purchase of an Altera Preferred Partner OpenCL board. The annual software subscription for the SDK for OpenCL is $995. For additional information please visit the OpenCL section on Altera’s website.

About Altera

Altera® programmable solutions enable designers of electronic systems to rapidly and cost effectively innovate, differentiate and win in their markets. Altera offers FPGAs, SoCs, CPLDs, ASICs and complementary technologies, such as power management, to provide high-value solutions to customers worldwide.  altera.com