Smart Modular announces the Kestral PCIe Optane AIC, which can add an Intel Optane PMem with a total capacity of 2TB to a motherboard’s PCIe 4.0×16 or PCIe 3.0×16 slot. Memory expansion and acceleration are achieved through software-defined storage capabilities combined with Intel FPGAs on expansion cards for terabyte-level PCIe connectivity, layered between DRAM and NAND flash.
Kestral PCIe Optane AIC is full-height, half-length, double-width, with an interface of PCIe 4.0×16 (backward compatible with PCIe 3.0), with four DIMM slots, supports up to four Intel Optane Optane PMem modules with a capacity of 512GB or four DDR4 LR-DIMMs with a capacity of 256GB. It integrates Intel Stratix 10 DX FPGA (which integrates four Arm Cortex-A53 cores), onboard 2GB DDR4 memory, and 8GB eMMC storage, power consumption is less than 150W, passive heat dissipation, requires an external 6Pin power supply. In addition, the current version supports the Optane PMem module based on the DDR-T interface, but only in Memory Mode and does not support the 3D XPoint feature of App Direct Mode.
