Xilinx’s new FPGA-powered Smart Network Interface Card (NIC) announcement opened the door for an introduction to Mipsology, a start-up that provides a software abstraction layer that it claims massively simplifies programming for the hardware acceleration silicon. Specifically, Mipsology is focused on video and images, and such services should facilitate increased adoption of FPGAs in core video workloads. The headline news was that Xilinx had unveiled its new Alveo SN1000 Smart NIC – the evolution of the NIC that connects servers together and to the outside world. It incorporates a 64-bit 16-core Cortex-A72 ARM CPU into the design, to run the additional application code that sets a Smart NIC apart from a regular NIC. However, a new set of services and…