Posted On: Jun 16, 2021
AWS EC2 F1 instances have been used by customers to accelerate a growing set of applications from genomic processing, data analytics, security, image/video analytics, machine learning and more. Developers have taken advantage of the FPGA developer kit and current standard F1.X.1.4 shells to easily build and deploy their applications.
Today we are announcing the new F1 Small Shell F1.S.1.0 that will use 30% less FPGA resources and improves transfer speeds between FPGA and Host by up to 20%, over the standard F1.X.1.4 shell. With the new smaller shell, developers can take advantage of the additional FPGA resources to accelerate applications and exercise greater control over the DMA. The small shell, which gives developers 6 additional clock regions, also reduces routing congestion and will ease timing closer.
The small shell (version F1.S.1.0) is now available in all regions, where F1 is supported. Developers can get started developing based on the new shell using a dedicated AWS FPGA developer kit and FPGA Developer AMI v1.10.0+ (Xilinx 2020.2 toolset or newer). The AWS Small Shell Migration Guide will assist in selecting the shell and help with migration and this quick start example gives step-by-step instructions on building a small shell design to running an AFI (Amazon FPGA Image) on F1 instances.
Click here to join the discussion on the FPGA Development forum.