Scottish FPGA specialist Nallatech is benefiting from a change of direction by Intel, which has opened up its front side bus to third party developers.
Nallatech has been contracted to develop socket-based microprocessor accelerator modules to support Intel server technology. A value was not given for the deal.
The Intel deal was worth enough to have sparked a round of rectruitment at Glasgow-based Nallatech.
“This is a new and emerging market in which there will be hundreds of millions of dollars in the next few years,” Craig Anderson, CEO of Nallatech, told EW.
“We are going to need extra people for this contract,” said Anderson. Five extra staff have just been taken on and another four or five will also be recruited, he said, with the creation of a team dedicated to the development for Intel.
Analysts suggested the move was forced by competition from AMD.
The development programme will lead to design tools and a product at the end of the year, which becomes a Nallatech-owned product.
“We will own the product and will sell it. We hope to leverage the Intel customer base of course,”
added Anderson.
The product will be a Virtex-5 FPGA-based accelerator module and the company is working with Xilinx on the development.
“The aim is to create a powerful solution for addressing the most demanding computing problems,” said Dr Dileep Bhandarkar, director of advanced architectures for Intel.