SK Telecom installs Xilinx FPGAs for AI acceleration in data centers

SK Telecom is running artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration boards powered Xilinx FPGAs 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. The Xilinx FPGA add-in cards are installed in existing CPU-only servers.

The company reports up to 5X higher performance in ASR applications when compared to GPUs, and more importantly, 16X 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.

"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.

"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."