XtremeData's XD1000 plugs into the same 68by 60-mm, 940-pin socket as AMD's Opteron processors. The XD1000 also has HyperTransport links just like the Opteron. The difference is at the core, where XtremeData has placed an Altera Stratix II FPGA.
The FPGA can have access to the same kind of 128-bit wide DDR-333 off-chip memory as an Opteron. It also can communicate with other HyperTransport devices attached to the fabric. And, it has4 Mbytes of Zero Bus Turnaround (ZBT) SRAM and 32 Mbytes of configuration flash memory.
The XD1000 lets developers incorporate FPGAs while using a standard, multichip motherboard designed for Opteron processors. The module has a JTAG test port for FPGA reconfiguration along with four programmable LEDs and eight programmable test pads. The developer package comes with source code for a Linux device driver.
This level of integration permits FPGA acceleration within the data stream without the need to develop custom boards or to resort to interfaces with more overhead such as PCI Express. With the flexibility of an FPGA and its tight integration, developers can incorporate any number of soft cores within a heterogenous multicore solution.