AMD Announces New Fintech Accelerator Card for Ultra-Low Latency Electronic Trading

AMD has unveiled the AMD Alveo UL3524 accelerator card, a new fintech accelerator designed for ultra-low latency electronic trading applications. This card, already being used by leading trading firms, provides traders, market makers, hedge funds, brokerages, and exchanges with a state-of-the-art FPGA platform for electronic trading at nanosecond speed.

The Alveo UL3524 offers a 7X latency improvement over previous generation FPGA technology, achieving less than 3ns FPGA transceiver latency for accelerated trade execution. Powered by a custom 16 nm Virtex UltraScale + FPGA, it features a unique transceiver architecture with optimized network connectivity cores for breakthrough performance. The card combines hardware flexibility with ultra-low latency networking, enabling faster design closure and deployment compared to traditional FPGA alternatives.

"In ultra-low latency trading, a nanosecond can determine the difference between a profitable or losing trade," said Hamid Salehi, director of product marketing at AMD. "The Alveo UL3524 accelerator card is powered by the lowest latency FPGA transceiver from AMD—purpose-built to give our fintech customers an unprecedented competitive advantage in financial markets."

Hardware Flexibility and AI-Enabled Trading Strategies

The Alveo UL3524 features 64 ultra-low latency transceivers, 780K LUTs of FPGA fabric, and 1,680 DSP slices of compute. It is designed to accelerate custom trading algorithms in hardware, allowing traders to tailor their designs to evolving strategies and market conditions. The product is supported by traditional FPGA flows using Vivado Design Suite and comes with a suite of reference designs and performance benchmarks.

To simplify the adoption of AI in algorithmic trading, AMD is providing developers with the open-sourced and community-supported FINN development framework. This framework enables developers to reduce the size of AI models while retaining accuracy, compiling to hardware IP, and integrating the network model into the algorithm's datapath for low latency performance.

Enabling a Growing Ecosystem of Ultra-Low Latency Fintech Solutions

The Alveo UL3524 and purpose-built FPGA technology are enabling strategic partners to build custom solutions and infrastructure for the fintech market. Current partner solutions include offerings from Alpha Data, Exegy, and Hypertec.

Alpha Data has developed the ADA-R9100 rack-mount appliance, which utilizes the AMD Virtex UltraScale+ VU2P FPGA to access the full potential of the new AMD FPGA device.

Exegy is supporting the Alveo UL3524 card with its nxFramework, a software and hardware development environment tailored for ultra-low latency FPGA applications in the financial industry.

Hypertec has optimized its ORION HF X410R-G6 High Frequency Server for the Alveo UL3524, deploying it in a 1U server form factor with a custom cooling system.

The AMD Alveo UL3524 accelerator card is currently in production and shipping to global financial services customers.