While Huawei’s FACS offers a complete infrastructure as a service, the Xilinx technology behind it can provide a 10-50x speed-up for compute intensive cloud applications such as machine learning, data analytics, and video processing. The inherent ability of an FPGA to be reconfigured and reprogrammed at any time is a critical advantage in today’s modern data centres.
Xilinx FPGAs can quickly change – in less than a second – to a different design that is hardware-optimised for its next workload. As a result, FPGAs can deliver the flexibility, application breadth, and feature velocity required by complex and constantly changing cloud application workloads – something that CPUs and custom ASICs cannot.
“The Huawei FACS is a fully integrated hardware and software platform offering developer-to-deployment support with best-in-class industry tool chains and access to Huawei’s significant FPGA engineering expertise,” said Steve Langridge, Director, Central Hardware Institute, Huawei Canada Research Centre. “Xilinx is a clear industry leader in FPGA acceleration and our considerable collaboration, both in the labs and in standards groups, has enabled us to create the best value possible for our customers.”