Agilex Dials M for Memory

Intel announced its first Agilex to copackage DRAM, sporting a pair of HBM2e stacks that deliver up to 32GB. It’s also using the Intel 7 process to further cut power dissipation.

Bob Wheeler

Instead of keeping FPGA customers in suspense, Intel preannounced Agilex-M, which stands out for bandwidth-hungry designs. It’s the first Agilex to copackage DRAM, sporting a pair of HBM2e stacks that deliver up to 32GB, but it’s also first to handle DDR5 SDRAM. That means customers can employ the HBM2e for speed and external memory for depth. The new line expands on Agilex-I, which now scales to 4.0 million logic elements and is sampling. Agilex-M is due to sample by year end using the Intel 7 process, which promises a 10–15% power reduction compared with the 10nm SuperFin process of the F- and I-series.

The recent announcement fills in Agilex-M details Intel omitted three years ago when it revealed specifications for the other Agilex families. The HBM2e stacks operate at 3.2Gbps, delivering 410GB/s each, and four external DDR5-5600 channels add 179GB/s for a total of 1.0TB/s. The high-end AGM 039 model has 3.9 million logic elements, nearly matching the AGI 040 atop the I-series. It has 370Mb of block RAM plus another 40Mb of RAM, and it sports 12,300 DSP blocks—again, nearly matching the AGI 040.