AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU Spotted

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AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU 2
AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU 2

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.

AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU For Front End Networks
AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU For Front End Networks

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.

AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU 1
AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU 1

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.

AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU 4
AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU 4

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

AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU 2
AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU 2

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

AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU 3
AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU 3

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 theĀ 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.

8 COMMENTS

  1. jasonlu – you map the DPU to a VM, and you manage it through VM

    As for the SATA – IIRC, I heard that it’s also being used for power on devices which don’t have PCI 6 pin cables

  2. I think the time frame for discrete DPU products is going to be coming to an end as high speed networking moves on socket as part of the chiplet approach. They’ll still exist in the sense that there will be a some dedicated IP to supplement NIC functionality but the idea of full dedicated CPU cores for this will just migrate back to the main CPU complex once on package.

  3. My guess the reason for 2 x 400GbE link is perhaps the card is being qualified or has support for PCIE Gen6 x16?

  4. As a DSC with 800GbE port capacity and 400GbE bus capacity it’s to be used in applications where it’s not transfering all the bits over the bus, unless it can always obtain better compression than expected.

    It’s more likely that what comes in one port will mostly go out the other, you’d probably be able to grab all the headers and do intelligent routing, or firewall security; with P4 updated over the PCIe 5 bus

    It could implement a UltraEthernet router, supporting the UET over Ethernet.

    Etc.

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