FPGA: Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is located on each SPU. Netezza is different from other architectures. Netezza can do a “hardware upgrade” through software by using FPGA. Hardware is reconfigured during install.
While reading data from disk, FPGA on each SPU also helps in ‘filtering’ unnecessary data before getting loaded into memory on each SPU. This way, FPGA does not overwhelm all the data from the disk.
