Why Xilinx Will Disrupt Itself When New ACAP Chip Launches

An ACAP is suited to accelerate a large set of applications in the emerging era of big data and artificial intelligence. These use cases include video transcoding, database, data compression, search, AI inference, genomics and others. Xilinx (pronounced “zye-links”) is one of those funny-named, specialized companies that makes a cog in data center machinery that is important for efficiency’s sake but that is so melded into the infrastructure that it’s easy to be overlooked. The San Jose, Calif.-based chipmaker, which makes an item called a field-programmable gate array, or FPGA for short, on March 19 announced a new product that it says will eventually supercede what its frontline product already does in an IT system. It’s called an adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP), and Xilinx claims this proprietary 7nm chip goes far beyond the capabilities of an FPGA, which are already in wide use. It’s still vaporware at this point, however, with testing beginning later this year.