Xilinx Selected by Alibaba Cloud for Next-Gen FPGA Cloud Acceleration

Xilinx FPGAs are accelerating machine learning and other critical compute workloads for one of the world's largest cloud providers

HANGZHOU, China, Oct. 12, 2017 -- Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced at the Computing Conference that Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, has chosen Xilinx for next generation FPGA acceleration in their public cloud. As the largest cloud provider in China, Alibaba Cloud offers high-performance, elastic computing power to over two million customers. Based on Xilinx® FPGAs, the new "F2" instances give Alibaba Cloud customers access to acceleration for data analytics, genomics, video processing, and machine learning workloads.

Faced with exponential growth in computing requirements and the inability for CPU technology to keep pace, today's cloud providers are moving toward accelerated computing architectures. FPGA accelerators compliment CPU-based architectures and deliver both performance and power efficiency working in tandem with a server's CPU. Alibaba Cloud has recently revealed that the processing efficiency of F2 instances can be up to 30 times higher than CPUs alone, resulting in more cost effective cloud solutions.

"Xilinx FPGAs deliver the performance, flexibility, and application breadth needed by today's ever changing cloud workloads," said Steve Glaser, Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy at Xilinx. "F2 instances offer the opportunity to develop and publish hardware-accelerated data center applications to millions of customers on Alibaba Cloud."

"FPGAs are popular general-purpose parallel accelerators meeting the evolving computing needs of data center workloads. We look forward to working with Xilinx to harness advancements in heterogeneous computing," said Jin Li, Vice President of Alibaba Cloud.

Access to F2 instances on Alibaba Cloud is available today.

About Xilinx
Xilinx is the leading provider of All Programmable FPGAs, SoCs, MPSoCs, RFSoCs, and 3D ICs. Xilinx uniquely enables applications that are both software defined and hardware optimized – powering industry advancements in Cloud Computing, Video/Vision, Industrial IoT, and 5G Wireless. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com.