Anisotropic diffusion is one of the most effective methods used in image processing. It can be used to eliminate the small textures of an imagewhile preserving its significant edges. In this paper,a new anisotropic diffusion filter is proposed based on a fractional calculus kernel rather than an integer kernel to improve the overall performance of the filter. Integer and fractional anisotropic filters are implementedusing the Genesys-2 FPGA kit to utilize the efficiency of parallelism in FPGAs. Integer and fractional anisotropic filters are tested against the achievable PSNR value vs the number of iterations. The proposed fractional anisotropic filter has a better PSNR value using a smaller number of iterations, reducing the power and area compared to integer anisotropic filter.The proposed filter can be used in image smoothing,edge detection, image segmentation, image denoisingand cartooning. In addition, the proposed filter will save the power of applications with power constraints, such as portable devices, as it requires fewer iterations than integer anisotropic filters. The proposed filter reduces the required power consumption by 58.2%.