At this point,
As I covered here, Xilinx recently announced an innovative hybrid architecture, called an Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform, and its first instantiation, a family of chips built on 7nm called Xilinx Versal. These chips target datacenters with a combination of ASIC-like features for AI and 5G. These, along with the chips’ reprogrammable logic, could transform many datacenter applications, and should appeal to a larger audience than traditional FPGAs. Since Versal is not expected to ship until 2019, the Microsoft deal, if it is real, is probably based initially on Xilinx’s current FPGA products. However, I suspect that Microsoft sees a lot of value in Xilinx’s roadmap, and recognizes its lead over Intel’s manufacturing plans for Altera.
To get a feel for how big this move is for both firms, consider that Microsoft previously stated that all its Azure and Bing servers across all its datacenters now have (Intel) FPGAs to accelerate a wide variety of workloads. Microsoft built a network topology that provides direct access to a sea of FPGAs installed in its servers to deliver acceleration at extreme scale and very low latency. If Microsoft is indeed switching new servers to Xilinx FPGAs, and I believe it is, this would mean an eventual footprint of millions of devices and servers—even if it decides to stop the deployment at a 50% penetration rate to maintain competition between the two largest FPGA vendors.
Stay tuned, but I think this news is legitimate and will have a material impact on all companies involved.
Disclosure: Moor Insights & Strategy, like all research and analyst firms, provides or has provided research, analysis, advising and/or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry mentioned in this article, including Microsoft, Intel, Xilinx, and many others.