Xilinx partnerships with Samsung, Kameleon yield products

Xilinx may be in the middle of an acquisition by AMD, but the partnerships and deals continue.

Most recently, Samsung and Xilinx have partnered to deliver the SmartSSD CSD flash drive, a compute-on-storage SSD device that uses a Xilinx FPGA to offload the processing work.

The SmartSSD CSD is a standard 2.5-inch (U.2) form factor solid state drive that looks like the standard SATA drive found in desktops and laptops but has a PCI Express 3×4 port. Starting capacity is 4TB with the ability to hold up to 12TBs of data or more when combined with accelerated transparent compression. The CSD has API-driven programmability because of the FPGA processor and new software libraries to enable faster computational storage development.

Up to 24 of the U.2 CSDs can fit into a 2U server for a total of 96TB of raw data, and more with compression. Xilinx says it can increase capacity up to three times the raw limit, depending on the type of data. This allows the drives to do the data processing instead of the CPU

Samsung claims the SmartSSD CSD accelerates data processing performance by 10x or more for applications such as database management, video processing, artificial intelligence layers, complex search, and virtualization.

“The industry is beginning to realize just how much the SmartSSD CSD will be able to boost performance in the data center and far beyond, and with the latest Xilinx tools for application development we anticipate dramatic growth in a wealth of acceleration applications,” said Jim Elliott, corporate senior vice president of memory sales and marketing at Samsung Semiconductor, in a statement.

SmartSSD CSDs are available for pre-order today and begin shipping with general availability in January.

New security chip for servers

Another new deal is a joint solution with startup Kameleon Security, which focuses on an advanced hardware cybersecurity platform for computing systems to create what Kameleon calls the industry’s first Proactive Security Processing Unit (ProSPU).

Kameleon and Xilinx teamed to announce the Kameleon ProSPU cyber protection chip for servers, data centers and cloud computing. The ProSPU enforces compute system security from boot and all throughout a system’s lifecycle.

Kameleon ProSPU is the first product to be compliant with the new Open Compute Project V1.0 Security standard, introduced this week at the OCP Tech Week virtual event. The standard includes the Root of Trust (RoT) spec, which includes security documents for secure boot, attestation, and common threats scope.

“Kameleon’s unique approach not only protects systems at boot, but it also uses the power of our industry-leading FPGAs to protect systems at runtime,” said Sina Soltani, vice president worldwide sales in the data center group at Xilinx, in a statement. “We see many opportunities for this solution, and we look forward to getting it to the market.”

Kameleon and Xilinx are working with ecosystem partners and customers towards the commercial launch of the ProSPU in 2021.