It's targeting the high power efficiency part of the spectrum where nvidia is much less available. There's some reasonably capable software support, in fact the linux driver linked is significantly more capable than the "SDK" they released so far for windows.

Which makes sense, because under Xilinx brand they have been selling accelerators and SoCs using AIE and AIE-ML cores for various use cases in embedded world, and XRT lets you program those with pretty much plain C++.

For some AI tasks, they have provided high-end wrappers for models that use ONNX (iirc) so those can be used immediately. This is not ROCm, and has essentially none of the ROCm bullshit in terms of support. I seem to recall there's some work to integrate parts of ROCm (opencl, HIP) with XRT.

Definitely going to build some kernels with this and test drive it ASAP.