AMD Targets High-Bandwidth, High-Performance Workloads with Its Versal Premium Gen. 2 FPGA

AMD has announced a new entry in its high-performance Versal Gen. 2 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) system-on-chip (SoC) platform: the Versal Premium Gen. 2, its first part to support Compute Express Link (CXL) 3.1 and PCI Express Gen. 6 for high-bandwidth workloads.

"System architects are constantly looking to pack more data into smaller spaces and move data more efficiently between parts of the system," says AMD's Salil Raje of the company's latest FPGA launch. "Our latest addition to the Versal Gen 2 portfolio helps customers improve overall system throughput and utilization of memory resources to achieve the highest performance and unlock insights for their most demanding applications from the cloud to the edge."

The Versal Premium Gen. 2 is the company's first to support the latest CXL 3.1 and PCIe Gen. 6 connectivity standards, offering big gains in bandwidth for host-to-FPGA communications: AMD claims a two- to fourfold boost in line rate over rival designs with PCIe Gen. 4 or Gen. 5 connectivity and twice the bandwidth over CXL 2.1 — along with the updated standard's enhanced fabric and coherency capabilities.

This expanded bandwidth extents to the FPGA's memory interface, which supports LPDDR5X memory at up to 8,533Mb/s — up to 2.7x faster, AMD claims, than "comparable competitive devices" based on LPDDR4 or LPDDR5 memory interfaces. Memory can also be expanded using CXL-connected modules to deliver another 2.7x gain, AMD says, with support for memory pooling across multiple devices.

Those eager to get their hands on the new parts, though, will need to be patient: the company has promised development tools by the second quarter of next year, with silicon samples due early 2026 — and general availability penciled in to the second half of 2026, at an as-yet unannounced price point.

Models will be available with between 1.4M and 3.3M logic cells, 643k to 1.5M look-up tables, and 3,332 to 7,616 digital signal processing (DSP) engines; all models will include a dual-core Arm Cortex-A72 application process, dual-core Cortex-R5F real-time processor, and 256kB of on-chip error correcting code (ECC) memory.

More information on the new AMD Versal Premium Gen. 2 is available on AMD's product page.