AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU Spotted

AMD has a new DPU. The AMD Pensando Salina is a 400G capable DPU that is designed to take on the NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU for front-end networks. The DPU itself has 16 Arm Neoverse N1 cores along with up to 128GB of DDR5 memory onboard and the company’s P4 packet processing engine. STH found it at the AMD Advancing AI event with the AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” launch and we thought we would share.

AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU

Here is the quick spec slide. We can see the 232 P4 MPU which is the heart of the card’s packet processing. That along with the 16 Arm Neoverse N1 cores gives the card a lot of flexibility and processing power. Something worth noting is that there are dual 400GbE connections, but the card itself only has a PCIe Gen5 x16 interface to drive a single 400GbE link, not two simultaneously from the host system.

Here is the card. We can see a full-height card with two optical cages and a lot of heatsink across the card. Something quite notable here is that there is not an out-of-band management NIC. Typically, on NVIDIA BlueField DPUs, and even the newer BlueField SuperNICs, we see an OOB management port along with the main data ports. At the same time, when we had some hands-on time with an AMD Pensando DSC2-100G Elba DPU in a Secret Lab we found that VMware ESXio was not using the OOB management port.

On the back, we can see a power input. That is fairly common since these DPUs tend to use a good amount of power. Then there is perhaps the coolest feature: a SATA port. Let us just say that in 2024 that is unexpected.

Here is the view of the card covered in a heatsink.

Here is the back of the card with a nice heatspreader.

AMD told us this is able to handle a lot of traffic, like 5 million connections per second due to the programmable P4 engines.

Final Words

We shall see how this fares. The NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU has been at STH making cameos in pieces for several months now. Likewise, we tested the Marvell Octeon 10 Arm Neoverse N2 DPU almost two years ago and that had Arm Neoverse N2 cores. Hopefully we can get some hands-on time with the new Salina-based cards both on the DPU and NIC side over the next few quarters.