XtremeData is shipping its newest set of FPGAs made for giving Intel's Xeon chips a helping hand with math work.

The XD200i lineup uses Altera's Stratix III FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) that plug into Xeon sockets, providing a massive speed boost to certain high performance computing applications. Their typical customers are crunching numbers for military, financial, medical and bioscience applications.

“For Monte Carlo applications, the XD2000i with Altera’s Stratix III EP3S260 FPGA in full double-precision floating point achieves approximately a 16X improvement, when measured on the performance/watt metric, of a high-end single-precision GPU,” said XtremeData CEO, Ravi Chandran.

The company says placing a XD2000i in Xeon sockets gives the coprocessor a high-speed link to memory as well as a speedy connection to the host processor — without a need to modify the board.

The module runs below 60 watts and can be packed nicely into a blade form factor.

The XD200i line for Xeon dual-processor platforms is available now. A version for Xeon multiprocessors will be available in the third quarter of 2008.

XtremeData has been selling a similar product for Opteron-based systems and competes against other accelerator types dabbling with GPGPUs and Cell chips.®

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