Today, Intel announced a new brand for the Mount Evans DPU IPU. The company is calling the new chip the Intel E2000. What is more, the company is starting to offer it deployed in Google Cloud instances wit the C3 VM with 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors when those are available.
Intel E2000 is the new Intel Mount Evans DPU IPU Brand
The Intel Mount Evans IPU is the company’s product that we would call a “DPU” if comparing it to product lines from companies like AMD, NVIDIA, Marvell, and so forth. If you want to learn more about the technology, see What is a DPU A Data Processing Unit Quick Primer.
Intel showed off Mount Evans in a development board form factor in 2021.
Mount Evans will combine P4 packet processing logic along with Arm cores and accelerators that are based on some of the QuickAssist IP. This is Intel’s offering to counter NVIDIA BlueField-3 and AMD Pensando cards directly.
We saw Mount Evans, now the Intel E2000 series at Intel Vision 2022 earlier this year
Here is a look at the card with the chip exposed.
Here we can see two NIC ports and an out-of-band management port.
The Intel E2000 name may make think of Intel’s well-known “e1000” line and driver that many of us use in virtualization setups to this day. It is a fairly huge jump to this processor from there.
Final Words
For most of us, this will take some time to actually get ahold of and deploy, even though Intel will be supported as one of VMware ESXi 8.0’s DPU options. Our best guess is that we will see this technology in 2023 in non-Google servers. We have been told the current production run is being allocated mostly to Google. As a new platform, Google has the ability to make it work in its infrastructure. There is more work that will need to be done atop Intel’s help on the initial Google roll-out for the rest of us to be able to use the new E2000 series.
In the meantime, we have been showing some of Intel’s other IPUs like the hands-on with Big Spring Canyon. Check that out if you want to see a use case of how these are used.
Here is the official naming of the Intel IPU E2000 with its features:
I saw also photos originating from Google with a half height/half length version (with only one qsfp interface) of a E2000 card. Have you also seen that at Intel Innovation by any chance? That size would be awesome for Enterprise Edge implementations with using 25/50Gbit breakout cables!
Good to see Intel switching to ARM for their DPUs as well.