 Silicon Angle Media presents The Cube. Covering Alibaba Cloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now here's John Furrier. Hello everyone, welcome to The Cube here on the ground in China for Intel's booth here at the Alibaba Cloud event. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of Silicon Angle Wikibon and The Cube. I'm here with John Sakamoto who's the Vice President of the Programmable Solutions Group. Thanks for stopping by. Thank you for having me John. So, FPG days, you know, field programmable gate arrays, kind of a geeky term but it's really about software these days, what's new with your group? You came to Intel through an acquisition, how's that going? Yeah, so far it's been great. It's being part of a company with the resources like Intel and really having access to data center customers and some of the data center technologies and frameworks that they've developed and integrating FPGAs into that. It's been a great experience. You know, one of the hot trends here, just interviewed Dr. Wong at Alibaba Cloud, the founder and we were talking about Intel's relationship but one of the things he mentioned was striking to me is that they got this big city brain IoT project and I asked him about, you know, the compute at the edge and how data moves around and he said for all the silicon at the edge, one piece of silicon at the edge is going to be 10X inside the data center, inside the cloud or data center which is fundamentally the architecture these days. So it's not just about the edge, it's about how the combination of software and compute are moving around and that means that data center is still relevant for you guys. What is the impact of FPGA in the data center? Well, I think FPGAs really are a great play in the data center. You mentioned city brain. City brain is a great example where they're streaming live video into the data center for processing and that kind of processing power to do video live really takes a lot of horsepower and that's really where FPGA is coming to play. One of the reasons that Intel acquired Altera was really to bring that acceleration into the data center and really that is a great compliment to Xeon's. Take a minute on FPGA, do you have to be a hardware geek to like work with FPGA? I mean, obviously software is a big part of it. What's the difference between the hardware side and the software side on the programmability? Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, most people think FPGAs are hard to use and that they work for hardware geeks. The traditional flow had been using RTL based flows and really what we've recognized is to get FPGA adoption very high within the data center, we have to make it easier and we've invested quite a bit in an acceleration stack to really make it easier for FPGAs to be used within the data center. And what we've done is we've created frameworks and pre-optimized accelerators for the FPGAs to make it easy for people to access that FPGA technology. What's the impact of developers because, you know, you look at the acceleration stack that you guys announced, oh, last month was... Yes, that's correct. Okay, so last month this is going to move more of a software model. So it's almost programmability as a DevOps kind of a software mindset. So the hardware can be programmed. What's the impact of the developer makeup and how does that change the solutions? How does that impact the environment? Yeah, so the developer makeup, what we're really targeting is guys that really have traditionally developed software and they're used to higher level frameworks or they're used to designing and see. So what we're trying to do is really make that those designers, those developers really to be able to use those languages and frameworks they're used to and be able to target the FPGA. And that's what the acceleration stack's all about. And our goal is to really obfuscate that we're actually having FPGA that's that accelerator. And so we've created kind of standard APIs to that FPGA so they don't really have to be an FPGA expert. And we've taken things, basically standardize some things like the connection to the processor or connections to memory or to networking and made that very easy for them to access. We're seeing a lot of that maker culture kind of vibe and orientation come into this new developer market because when you think about a field programmable gate array, the first thing that pops into my mind is oh my God, I got to be a computer engineering geek motherboards to design all the circuits. But it's really not that. You're talking about acceleration as a service. That's right. This is super important because this brings that software mindset to the marketplace for you guys. So talk about that acceleration as a service. What is it? What does it mean? Define it and then let's talk about what it means. Yeah, okay, great. So acceleration as a service is really having pre-optimized software or applications that really are running on the FPGA. So the user that's coming in and trying to use that acceleration service doesn't necessarily need to know there's an FPGA there. They're just calling in and wanting to access a function and it just happens to be accelerated by the FPGA. And that's why one of the things we've been working with with Alibaba, they announced their F1 service. That's based on Intel's ARIA 10 FPGAs. And again, we've created a partner ecosystem that have developed pre-optimized accelerators for that FPGA. So users are coming in and doing things like genomic sequencing or database acceleration and they don't necessarily need to know that there's an FPGA actually. So that's a sustainer developer, just focusing on an app or a use case with big data and then it can tap into the hardware. Absolutely. And they'll get a huge performance increase. So we have a partner Falcon Computing, for example, that can really increase the performance of the algorithm and really get a three X improvement in the overall gene sequencing and really improve the time it takes to do that. Yeah, I mean, Cloud and what you're doing is just changing society. Congratulations, that's awesome. I want to talk about Alibaba. What is the relationship with Intel and Alibaba? We've been trying to dig that out on this trip. For your group, obviously you mentioned the city brain. You mentioned the accelerations that serve the F1 instances. What specifically is the relationship? How tight is it? What are you guys doing together? Well, the Intel PSG group, our group, has been working very closely with Alibaba in a number of areas. So clearly the acceleration, the FPGA acceleration is one of those areas, they're big, big investors. We announced the Aria 10 version today, but we'll continue to develop with them in the next generation Intel FPGAs, such as Stratix 10, which is based on 14 nanometer, and eventually with our Falcon Mesa product, which is a 10 nanometer product. So clearly acceleration's a focus. Building that ecosystem out with them is going to be a continued focus. We're also working with them on servers and trying to enhance the performance of those servers. And I can't really talk about the details in all of those things, but certainly there are certain applications in FPGAs that they're looking to accelerate the overall performance of their customer servers and we're partnering with them on that. So one of the things that I'm getting out of this show here is besides the convergence of e-commerce, entertainment, and web services, which is Alibaba's kind of like aperture, is that it's more of a quantum mindset. And we talked about blockchain in my last interview. You see quantum computing up on their patent board. Some serious IT kinds of things, but from a data perspective. How does that impact your world? Because you providing acceleration, you got the city brains in which it's a huge IoT and AI opportunity. How does someone attack that solution with FPGAs? How do you get involved? What's your role in that whole play? Again, we're trying to democratize FPGAs. We're trying to make it very easy for them to access that. And really that's what, that's what working with Alibaba is about. They are enabling FPGAs access via their cloud. Really in two aspects. One we talked about which is, we have some pre-optimized accelerators that people can access. So applications people can access that are running on FPGAs. But we're also enabling a developer environment where people can use the traditional RTL flow or they can use an open CL flow to take their code, compile it into the FPGAs and really get that acceleration that FPGAs can provide. So it's not only building, bringing that ecosystem accelerators, but also enabling developers to develop on that platform. You know, we do a lot of cloud computing coverage and a lot of people really want to know what's inside the cloud. So it's one big operation, so that's the way I look at it. But there's a lot going on there under the hood. What are some of the things that Alibaba's saying to you guys in terms of how the relationship's translating into value for them? You mentioned the F1 instances. Any anecdotal sound bites you can share on the feedback and their direction. Yeah, so one of the things they're trying to do is lower the total TCO of the data center. And one of the things they have is when you look at the infrastructure costs, such as networking and storage, these are cycles that are running on the processor. And when their cycle's running on the processor, they can't monetize that with their customers. So one of the areas we're working with is how do we accelerate networking and storage functions on an FPGA and therefore freeing up cores that they can monetize with their own customers. Really, that's the way we're trying to drop the TCO down with Alibaba, but also increase the revenue opportunity they have. What's some updates from the field from you guys? Obviously, acceleration's pretty hot. Everyone wants low latency. With IoT, you need to have low latency. You need compute at the edge. More application development is coming in with vertical specialty, if you will. Yeah, city brains is more of an IoT, but the app is traffic, right? So they're managing traffic. There's going to be a million more use cases. What are some of the things that you guys are doing with FPG days outside of the Alibaba thing? Well, I think really what we're trying to do is really focus on really three areas. If you look at one is to lower the cost of infrastructure, which I mentioned, networking and storage functions that today people are using, running those processes on processors and trying to lower that and bring that into the FPGA. The second thing we're trying to do is you look at high cycle apps, such as AI applications, and really trying to bring AI really into FPGAs and creating frameworks and tool chains to make that easier. And then we already talked about the application acceleration, things like database, genomics, financial, and really those applications running much quicker and more efficiently on FPGA. This is the big DevOps movement we've seen with cloud. Infrastructure as code, it used to be called. I mean, that's the new normal now. Software guys programming infrastructure. Absolutely. Well, congratulations on the great step, John Segamoto here inside theCUBE. Studios here at the Intel booth, we're getting all the action, roving reporter. We had CUBE conversations here in China, getting all the action about Alibaba Cloud. I'm John Flurry here. Thanks for watching.