Intel Corp (INTC)

[Wouter Tinus]

You have been - deliberately, I believe - confused by Intel if you think that any Xeon they are shipping now or in the near term has an FPGA inside. They have announced and reiterated plans to do that at some undefined later date, but far they have nothing to show for it.

What Intel performance/software engineers really did was enable an existing but dormant feature through means of a BIOS update. It's possible to do that on any Xeon E7v2 out there. The only reason other customers haven't been using it is because either their OS/middleware doesn't support it (yet), or they are not running the type of workload that benefits from it.

That is not custom silicon, not an FPGA, and not worth the poo-ha. Hence my suspicion that they crafted their PR message deliberately to confuse people.

SemiAccurate all but confirms my theory today:

http://semiaccurate.com/2014/07/18/intel-dynamically-scales-core-counts-oracle/