OpenCL and the reconfigurable data centre

Part 3: General purpose data centres

Xilinx's adoption of the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) as part of its SDAccel development tool is important, not just for FPGAs but also for the computational capabilities of the data centre.

The FPGA vendor is promoting its chips as server co-processors to tackle complex processing tasks such as image searches, encryption, and custom computation.   

Search-engine specialists such as Baidu and Microsoft have seen a greater amount of traffic for image and video searches in the last two years, says Loring Wirbel, senior analyst at market research firm, The Linley Group: "All of a sudden they are seeing that these accelerator cards as being necessary for general-purpose data centres."

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