“We launched the Developer Preview of the FPGA-equipped F1 instances at AWS re:Invent. The response to the announcement was quick and overwhelming! We received over 2000 requests for entry, and were able to provide over 200 developers with access to the Hardware Development Kit (HDK) and the actual F1 instances. In the post that I wrote for re:Invent, I told you that: This highly parallelized model is ideal for building custom accelerators to process compute-intensive problems. Properly programmed, an FPGA has the potential to provide a 30x speedup to many types of genomics, seismic analysis, financial risk analysis, big data search, and encryption algorithms and applications. During the preview, partners and developers have been working on all sorts of exciting tools, services, and applications. I’ll tell you more about them in just a moment.”