FPGAs from Intel and Xilinx have been steadily carving out niches in datacenter applications where low power, high performance, and configurability may trump programming challenges. Xilinx and AWS have been working with solution providers to create shrink-wrapped applications and tools which use AWS F1 FPGA instances, and Microsoft has recently announced some pretty stellar results in its Project BrainWave AI program using Intel (Altera) FPGAs. Almost a year ago I covered the initial AWS offerings. At the time, I felt that AWS needed to go from 3 solutions to 30 to convince me and the market that there is real demand, and then to 100 to have a material impact on the market. I recently noticed that AWS is now at 20 Amazon Marketplace Instances (AMIs), so it seemed like a good time to check back in.
New AWS F1 Solutions (AMIs) First, let’s review the basic FPGA building blocks in the cloud. Xilinx provides FPGAs to Amazon, which can be configured in Amazon F1 elastic cloud instances to accelerate a wide variety of workloads. However, using this technology traditionally takes significant work by the few engineers in the industry who are skilled in both hardware and software design. To address this barrier to adoption, Amazon and Xilinx in 2017 initially worked with solution providers Edico Genome, NGCodec, and RYFT to deliver genomics, image processing, and complex analytic solutions, respectively, as a shrink-wrapped solution using F1 AMIs. Now the challenge is to find and nurture more solutions in Deep Learning and other fields that can take advantage of this elegant architectural and go-to-market approach to FPGA application acceleration.