AMD has launched a new accelerator optimized for high-frequency trading.
Part of the AMD Alveo FinTech accelerator portfolio, the addition can achieve less than three nanoseconds of FPGA transceiver latency.
Dubbed the Alveo UL3422, AMD said that the accelerator is designed to give high-frequency traders "an edge in the race to the fastest trade execution" while also lowering cost barriers.
The accelerator has a slim full height, half-length form factor which helps it to fit into a range of servers and colocation exchange data centers.
AMD adds that the transceiver's architecture has been designed with "hardened, optimized network connectivity cores" and is custom-built for high-speed trading.
The card is powered by the AMD Virtex UltraScale VU2P FPGA, and has 780K LUTs of FPGA fabric and 1,680 DSP slices of compute.
FPGAs, field programmable gate arrays, are a type of chip frequently used by high-frequency traders. The FPGA can be customized only to perform trading functions and algorithms, making it faster and more energy efficient than using a general-purpose processing unit such as a CPU or GPU.
Other techniques used by high-frequency traders to shave off latency include free space optical connections between data centers, and physically paying for real estate in the data center that is closer to the exchange.
DCD has done a deep dive into high-frequency trading in its latest magazine. You can read it for free here.
