Altera, a spinoff of Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group (PSG), shared new details about the next generation of power- and cost-optimized Agilex 3 chips at its annual Altera Innovators Day developer conference, and also announced new development kits and software support for FPGAs. Agilex 5.
Altera said that the new Agilex FPGAs differ from the previous generation with a higher level of integration, increased security and higher performance, combining these qualities in a compact package with a density of 25 thousand to 135 thousand logic elements. Along with the AI-enabled FPGA, the Agilex 3 family contains a pair of Cortex-A55 Arm cores.
Image source: Altera via ServeTheHome
The Agilex 3 series FPGAs are aimed at systems where energy efficiency is more important than performance. Intel believes these chips will find use in products such as connected devices, industrial robots and autonomous vehicles. For smart edge applications, it is FPGAs that enable real-time computing for time-sensitive applications. And for intelligent production automation technologies, Agilex 3 will offer seamless integration of sensors, drivers, actuators and machine learning algorithms.
Agilex 3 uses the HyperFlex architecture and has 1.9 times higher performance than the previous generation, Altera says. The performance increase is achieved due to integrated high-speed transceivers (up to 12.5 Gbit/s) and support for economical LPDDR4 memory. To meet the needs of both defense systems and commercial security projects, Agilex 3 adds data stream encryption, authentication and physical tamper detection.
The company said that software for the Agilex 3 FPGA will be released in the first quarter of 2025, and deliveries of development kits and the product itself are expected to begin in mid-2025. Altera also announced the upcoming release of Quartus Prime Pro 24.3 software for modern Agilex FPGAs and expanded support for embedded solutions. We are talking about both hardware units and, for example, the software RISC-V core of Nios V. In addition, support for the Agilex 5 SoC in Linux, VxWorks and Zephyr has been announced.
Customers will be able to use Quartus Prime Pro 24.3 for the Agilex 5 D series, which is aimed at a wider range of use cases compared to the Agilex 5 E, which is optimized for efficient computing at the edge. At the same time, a free Quartus Prime software license is available for the Agilex 5 E-series, which will lower the barrier to entry when working with mid-level Altera FPGAs. Compilation speed has also increased by almost a third.
Finally, Altera and its ecosystem partners announced the release of 11 new development kits based on Agilex 5 and SoM. In the future, Altera will focus specifically on working with partners, and is unlikely to create boards and solutions itself.