Intel to Introduce New CPU-FPGA Hybrid Chip Supported by Acceleration Stack and OpenCL
Last year, Intel acquired FPGA-focused Khronos member Altera. Intel has now announced a new line of hybrid chips that combine FPGAs with their well-known CPUs. One of the more interesting aspects of the new Intel FPGA ecosystem is the Acceleration Stack, an OpenCL based programming environment that can be used by developers for hybrid cards or discrete cards, including FPGAs, CPUs, and GPUs. The stack abstracts the programming required for the FPGAs to streamline and speed up development for accelerators and applications being used. Additionally, it allows for code to be reusable — porting between FPGAs/GPU/CPU should be possible without major changes. OpenCL, a C based programming language, will. This is quite the opposite of what had been available when Intel released the E600C seven years ago.
