As part of AMD’s VMware Explore 2022 presentation, the company released new details on its Pensando roadmap that we had not covered previously. The AMD Giglio DPU is slated for 2023. In 2024 the Salina DPU is expected on 5nm. The company also showed its current products and showed AMD EPYC integration plans.
AMD Pensando Giglio DPU for 2023 Salina DPU in 2024 and AMD EPYC Integration
Taking a quick step back, Pensando’s first DPU utilized HBM and was called Capri and was the 100G generation of product.
The 7nm shrink was the 200G Elba generation. We covered both in the Pensando Distributed Services Architecture SmartNIC.
Since then, AMD acquired Pensando for its DPU future and we finally are starting to get more details on the cards. Now part of AMD, we get more details on the Elba DPUs. An example is this DSC2-25G, the dual 25GbE part.
There is also a DSC2-100G. This is the dual QSFP28 card for 2x 100GbE.
We have NVIDIA BlueField-2 versions of both the above, but Pensando’s hardware availability has been more challenged. Hopefully under AMD that availability expands.
What AMD showed, however, was a roadmap for its DPUs. The AMD Pensando Giglio is named after an Italian island and is a Gen 2+ part. We asked AMD about this and this is a cost optimization update to the Elba generation that is slated for 2023.
In 2024, Pensando has the Salina generation its “Gen 3” part. This is designed to be a 5nm part capable of 800G speeds.
AMD also noted that it is going into more segments with its IP. The one that should not be a surprise is “AMD EPYC Solutions (Future)” under Enterprise DPUs. We cannot wait to see how this integration happens.
Hopefully, AMD figures out how to build an edge appliance with Pensando since the EPYC 3000 series is getting very long in the tooth.
Final Words
AMD Pensando now has names for the next generations with the Giglio and Salina. It also has a pathway to 800G solutions in the 2024 timeframe. This is important since both Intel and NVIDIA have shared their plans to hit a similar generational timeline.
Our biggest hope is that the AMD acquisition helps get more of these cards out in the market. Intel has many different efforts under its IPU umbrella, many we have seen hands-on. NVIDIA may not have as high-performance of architecture with its BlueField-2 DPU, but those cards are available enough that we have dozens in the lab. We actually stopped purchasing 100GbE NICs and standardized on BlueField-2 DPUs, and part of that was the ease of use. Our hope is that as AMD Pensando gets its hardware roadmap rolling, AMD also gets its user/ developer experience to be as easy as NVIDIA.
If you want to learn more about DPUs, feel free to check out our What is a DPU A Data Processing Unit Quick Primer from a few years ago where we actually covered the Pensando solution (pre-acquisition.)
