SAN JOSE, Calif. and
SEOUL, South Korea, Aug. 15, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Xilinx, Inc.
(NASDAQ: XLNX) and SK Telecom (SKT) today jointly announced that
SKT has deployed Xilinx® FPGAs as their artificial intelligence
(AI) accelerators in its data center. The Xilinx®
Kintex® UltraScale™ FPGAs are now running SKT's
automatic speech-recognition (ASR) application to accelerate NUGU,
its voice-activated assistant. SKT achieved up to five times higher
performance in ASR applications when compared to GPUs, and more
importantly, 16 times better performance-per-watt. This is the
first commercial adoption of FPGA accelerators in the AI domain for
large-scale data centers in South
Korea.
The FPGA-based accelerator lowers the total cost of ownership
(TCO) of ASR application servers by populating existing CPU-only
servers with efficient Xilinx FPGA add-in cards. The ASR servers
easily and simply accelerate multiple voice service channels with
Xilinx FPGA cards in their empty slots. One FPGA card provides more
than five times the performance of a single server, resulting in
substantial cost savings. This performance and TCO advantage
benefits SK Telecom and its customers.
"Over many years we have seen the shape of the industry evolve,
and we are proud to be at the forefront of developing AI
accelerators. By designing our solution based on the Xilinx KCU1500
board and our own bitstream image, we have developed a
cost-effective, high-performance application," said Kang-Won Lee, senior vice president, software
research and development center at SKT.
The adaptive nature of Xilinx FPGAs enables fast deployment of
custom hardware accelerators for the rapidly evolving field of AI
and deep learning. Moreover, FPGAs provide higher performance and
lower latency at lower power when compared to CPUs and GPUs. SK
Telecom joins a fast-growing list of high-profile commercial data
centers that have deployed FPGAs for compute acceleration.
"We are delighted to have the opportunity to deploy Xilinx FPGAs
to SKT's AI data center, a first in South
Korea," said Manish Muthal, vice president, marketing for
data center at Xilinx. "Xilinx Kintex UltraScale KCU1500 FPGAs show
that Xilinx has a major competitive edge in applications. Xilinx
will continue to focus its technological capabilities and
innovations on data center acceleration."
SKT plans to demonstrate its FPGA-based AI solution at the
Xilinx Developer Forum (XDF) being held in Silicon Valley on
October 1-2, and in Beijing on October
16.
About SK Telecom
Established in 1984, SK Telecom is
the largest mobile operator in Korea by both revenue and number of
subscribers. As of December 2017, the
company holds around 50 percent of the market, with 30.2 million
mobile subscribers including 22.87 million LTE subscribers. It has
reached KRW 17.520 trillion in
revenue in 2017. SK Telecom has led the advancement of mobile
technologies ranging from 2G to 4G, and is currently setting
important milestones in its journey to 5G. The company is not only
leading innovation in the field of mobile network, but also
providing IoT, media, home and platform services. SK Telecom is
determined to play a significant role in the Fourth Industrial
Revolution by achieving innovations and promoting shared growth
with other players in the industry. For more information visit
www.globalskt.com.
About Xilinx
Xilinx develops highly flexible and
adaptive processing platforms that enable rapid innovation across a
variety of technologies – from the endpoint to the edge to the
cloud. Xilinx is the inventor of the FPGA, hardware programmable
SoCs and the ACAP, designed to deliver the most dynamic processor
technology in the industry and enable the adaptable, intelligent
and connected world of the future. For more information, visit
www.xilinx.com.
© Copyright 2018 Xilinx, Inc. Xilinx, the Xilinx logo, Kintex,
and other designated brands included herein are trademarks of
Xilinx in the United States and other countries. All other
trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
PR Contact:
Xilinx
Tara Sims
media@xilinx.com
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SOURCE Xilinx, Inc.