At the AMD Advancing AI event last week, where we had the AMD EPYC 9005 Turin and AMD Instinct MI325X launches, we also heard from Cisco about its DPU switch. AMD has an upcoming Pensando 400G generation that we will go into soon on STH, but Patrick also got to see the shipping Cisco 8102-DPU switch.
Cisco 8102-DPU 12.8T Switch with AMD Pensando
Here is the Cisco 8102-DPU. This is far from the fastest switch out there since current generation switches are more like the 51.2T switch that we recently looked at. Still, this is designed with another feature: built-in DPU cards.
The idea is that instead of having DPUs on each server, many networking policies and so forth can be implemented at the switch level. That way, DPUs can live along the switch.
Cisco, Microsoft, and AMD had a case study at Cisco Live! 2024 and they said that using the accelerated infrastructure can save up to 22 cores while providing other benefits like reducing jitter.
Something that was really neat was seeing the AMD DPU “Elba” generation against the AWS NITROv5 and v4. AMD’s performance looks very good here.
We looked at the VMware AMD Pensando solution in our Hands-on with an AMD Pensando DSC2-100G Elba DPU in AMD’s Secret Lab piece last year.
As for specs of the Cisco 8102-28FH-DPU, the switch is based on the Cisco Silicon One Q200L and has 28x 400G QSFP-DD56 ports on the front. Cisco is supporting SONiC as well as RDMA for higher-performance workloads.
On top, the switch has four DPU sleds. These take up to 8x AMD Elba generation DPUs in two DPUs per sled for up to 1.6Tbps of DPU services.
At Cisco Live! 2024, Microsoft Azure discussed how it is accelerating services with the DPUs.
Final Words
This is an interesting take. Usually, we see DPUs deployed at the server level so they can expose services like storage and provisioning. We recently went into NVIDIA’s BlueField-3 aspirations on our Substack, given a unique feature we found. This is going the other direction and is becoming a programmable network services processor that can either be placed into servers, or into switches. It was great getting some Cisco 8102-DPU photos at the AMD event last week.
